Aldebaran Robotics, a Europe-based company manufacturing humanoid robots, has declared that it will make a major part of its source code open source by the end of this year.
The company has decided to distribute its source code to software developers and researchers. This move has aided developers, teachers and researchers to use the software and customize it as per their requirements.
Aldebaran Robotics admitted that there are several difficulties associated with the development of robotic systems such as navigation, speech recognition, mapping, grasping, and object recognition. Moreover, the security of the software incorporated in humanoids must be high. It must also be capable of running in limited spaces with the use of minimal resources. The company has been developing embedded systems for various robotics platforms for more than five years now. The company will make its cross-platform build tools, core communication library, middleware, and other important modules to open-source.
The embedded software solution, NAOqi, used in Aldebaran Robotics’ NAO robot features a rapid, consistent, distributed, and safe robotics framework, which offers a complete base for researchers and developers to customize and enhance NAO's functionality. This feature enables Aldebaran Robotics to successfully crowdsource the building of its robotics software. As a result, the NAO is transformed into a platform.
The NAO is ideal for conducting research studies on balance, motor skills, and grasping of objects. It can also be used for research on language, vision and man robot interaction or man machine interaction (MMI).
Source: http://www.aldebaran-robotics.com/