NAO: the humanoid that became a research standard, sold to a Chinese firm after its maker was liquidated

The robot that replaced AIBO at RoboCup

NAO is a humanoid made by Aldebaran, which Bruno Maisonnier founded in Paris in 2005. It stands about 57 cm tall and has 25 degrees of freedom. In 2007 the RoboCup Standard Platform League chose NAO to replace Sony's AIBO as its official robot, and the RoboCup Edition shipped in March 2008. Because every team uses the same robot, teams compete on software rather than hardware. NAO cost about €6,000. It spread to universities and schools, with about 20,000 sold in more than 70 countries (another source counts more than 13,000 in use; sources differ).

Sold twice, then liquidated in 2025

In 2012 SoftBank bought 80% of Aldebaran for about $100 million. In 2022 United Robotics Group, part of Germany's RAG Foundation, acquired SoftBank Robotics Europe and renamed it Aldebaran again. URG stopped funding the company in 2024. Aldebaran went into receivership in February 2025, and liquidation was ordered in June. It had 106 employees at the time. In July, Maxvision of Shenzhen bought the core assets and intellectual property, including NAO and Pepper, for €900,000. Maxvision said it would set up a French subsidiary, move production to China and start a toy robot business.

288 papers, mostly 15- to 30-minute sessions

NAO has been widely used in human-robot interaction research. A 2021 scoping review covered 288 papers from 2010 to 2020 that used NAO, 25 of them on therapy for autistic children. Wizard-of-Oz control, where a researcher operates the robot out of sight, was the second most common setup. The authors noted that “The studies with NAO are predominantly short-term and may last for approximately 15–30 min.” When the receivership was announced in 2025, universities worried that cloud services and repairs would stop, and raised NAO's overheating problems again.

A standard did not keep its maker alive

NAO earned the rare position of being the same machine in labs across many countries. That made it easier for researchers to compare results and share teaching materials. Becoming a standard did not keep the company alive, however. Once the maker was liquidated, labs that owned the robots had to worry about repairs and software support. NAO sits between AIBO, which owners kept repairing after Sony left, and Jibo, which lost its functions when its company closed. The name survived the asset sale, but who will support the robots already in use, and how far, is still unclear.

If this product becomes a standard in its field, who keeps that standard alive once the maker is gone?

What we haven’t confirmed

• Whether Maxvision is producing or supporting NAO in 2026
• How NAO Robotics SA, set up in June 2025, relates to Maxvision
• The gap between cumulative sales and units still in use
• Whether the cloud services and developer tools still work