According to an announcement at a robotics conference this week  Aldebaran Robotics is planning to make a significant proportion of its code open source.

Aldebaran Robotics is planning to release a significant proportion of its proprietary source code. This was announced at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation and the details are still far from clear.

Bruno Maisonnier commented

“We will release our software as OPEN SOURCE to allow researchers, teachers, and developers to adapt and extend our software according to their needs and knowledge."

How much of the code will be open sourced hasn't been specified but it does seem to be most of the important components:

"With over five years of experience in developing embedded systems for robotics platforms, we want to share our middleware, our core communication library, our cross-platform build tools and other essential modules with researchers, developers and emerging projects in humanoid robotics”

The NAOqi embedded software is cross-platform and forms a distributed robotics framework. The Nao robot has come from a small start to become once of the standard tools of educational and research robotics and it is also a lot of fun. At the moment a Nao is still a little too expensive to be used as a recreational platform but who knows. Currently it is claimed that there are over 1500 Nao robots being used in education and research.

I wonder what Nao thinks about being open source?

So far no comment, but it is worth watching his Star Wars performance and just imagine what he might have to say about it...

Related reading:

NAO strkes a blow for robot independence

Aldebaran to open source Nao robot

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