Tell You What Technology Can Do

Aldebaran Robotics' Nao robot has been a hit among robot enthusiasts who participate in the Robocup challenge, the annual humanoid robots soccer game.

Nao developed by the French company replaced Sony's Aibo dog as the standard platform for the competition last year and that has helped boost its popularity among a select crowd of enthusiasts.

But the robot still has a way to go before most general users can get near it.

The fully programmable robot is packed with features. With its humanoid appearance can be made to do any number of tasks and comes with x86 AMD Geocode 500 Mhz CPU, 1 GB flash memory, 256 MB SDRAM, two speakers, vision processing capabilities, Wi-fi connectivity and Ethernet port.

The robot has 25 degrees of freedom, which means it can do a lot more than just tilt is head, look right, left and take a few steps.

This makes it a very attractive machine for researchers and robot enthusiasts that want to take a blank-slate robot and program it themselves, says Chris Kilner, software engineer for Aldebaran Robotics, a Paris-based company.

It's also the reason Aldebaran says it is working to create a behavior exchange site where different programs written to manipulate the robot can be shared.

Aldebaran has shipped a little more than 100 robots since it launched in April. But the robots have been restricted to research labs and universities. Next year, the company hopes to expand distribution to some early adopters. But general users are unlikely to get it before 2010 as the company tries to create a version that will appeal to general consumers and manufacture it on a larger scale.

With the 10,000 Euros ($12,600) price tag on the robot, that may be out of the reach for most anyway.

For consolation, there's always the Femisapien robot from WowWee, equally charming but a lot less functional.