Aldebaran — the French pioneer of NAO and Pepper humanoid robots

• 2005
  Founded
• Paris, France
  Headquarters
• NAO 6
  Flagship (2018 / 2025 revival)
• ~37K sold
  NAO + Pepper installed base
• France
  Country
• Maxvision-owned
  Status (2025)

About Aldebaran

Aldebaran was founded in Paris in July 2005 by Bruno Maisonnier — an École Polytechnique and Télécom Paris graduate and former Crédit Agricole executive — who had begun an internal "Project Nao" as early as 2004 with the ambition of building an affordable, programmable humanoid companion robot. Originally named Aldebaran Robotics after the brightest star in the Taurus constellation, the company grew from a dozen founding engineers into one of the earliest and most influential commercial humanoid robotics firms in Europe. Its first funding round of €5 million from CDC Innovation and I-Source Gestion closed in early 2008, coinciding with the public release of NAO.

The commercial turning point came in August 2007, when NAO was chosen to replace Sony's Aibo quadruped as the standard platform of the RoboCup Standard Platform League, the flagship international robot-soccer competition. That single selection anchored NAO as the default humanoid research platform in universities worldwide. Intel invested $13 million in 2011, and in 2012 Japan's SoftBank Group acquired approximately 78.5% of Aldebaran for around $100 million, taking full control by 2015 with founder Bruno Maisonnier's exit. Under SoftBank, the company was renamed SoftBank Robotics Europe and used to design Pepper, the 1.20 m wheeled social robot introduced in Tokyo in June 2014 and manufactured by Foxconn.

Pepper's early Japanese launch was spectacular — the first consumer batch of 1,000 units sold out in 60 seconds in June 2015 — but commercial adoption never matched the hype. SoftBank halted Pepper production in June 2021, citing weak demand, and moved to divest its European robotics business. In April 2022, Germany's United Robotics Group (URG), a subsidiary of the RAG-Stiftung, agreed to acquire SoftBank Robotics Europe. The deal closed in July 2022 and the company reverted to its original name, Aldebaran, with SoftBank retaining a minority stake and remaining master distributor in Japan and Asia. URG, which had already been Aldebaran's master distributor in Europe since October 2021, attempted to revive the business with a hospitality robot called Plato and continued NAO 6 production.

The revival stalled. Aldebaran entered receivership in France in February 2025 after accumulating heavy losses, laid off roughly half of its remaining 200-person French workforce, and was placed under court supervision. In July 2025 a Paris commercial court auctioned Aldebaran's assets to Maxvision Technology, a Shenzhen-listed Chinese firm, for approximately €900,000 — patents, source code, and remaining stock. Maxvision established a French subsidiary, Maxtronics Robotics SAS, in Issy-les-Moulineaux and confirmed continued NAO 6 manufacture and support with former Aldebaran engineers. Pepper production has not resumed. Competitors in the interaction and social-robotics space include SoftBank Robotics (a separate entity that in February 2026 relaunched a rental-only Pepper+ in Japan), Furhat Robotics of Sweden, Engineered Arts of the UK, ROBOTIS of Korea, and a widening field of general-purpose humanoid startups that includes Figure AI, 1X, and Apptronik.

Technology stack

Unlike the current wave of general-purpose humanoid robots pursuing high-payload manipulation and factory work, Aldebaran's platforms were engineered from the start for human-robot interaction: safe close-range operation, expressive motion, multilingual speech, and long service life in unstructured environments like classrooms, museums, and reception areas. The technology stack reflects that priority — compact form factor, low-torque coreless DC motors, redundant safety sensors, and a proprietary middleware called NAOqi OS that abstracts the whole robot into a scriptable event and behavior graph.

Perception and interaction

NAO 6 carries two 5-megapixel OmniVision OV5640 CMOS cameras (one in the forehead, one in the mouth) with a 67.4° diagonal field of view, four omnidirectional MEMS microphones for sound source localization, two front sonar transmitter/receiver pairs, an IMU with a three-axis accelerometer and two gyros, nine capacitive tactile sensors distributed across the head and hands, magnetic rotary encoders on each joint, and force-sensitive resistors in each foot. Pepper adds a 3D depth sensor, HD cameras, and laser rangefinders on its mobile base. This heavy sensor package is what allowed NAO and Pepper to become defaults for university-level human-robot interaction and emotion-recognition research.

NAOqi OS, Choregraphe, and generative-AI integration

Every Aldebaran robot runs an embedded, Yocto-based GNU/Linux distribution with the proprietary NAOqi middleware, which exposes a distributed object model in C++ and Python (and Java over the network). The Choregraphe visual programming environment lets non-expert users compose behaviors by wiring together prebuilt boxes for speech, motion, vision, and dialog. Since 2024, NAO 6 has been extended with NAO Activities, a higher-level authoring layer that integrates generative AI (large language and vision-language models) so that teachers, therapists, and caregivers can create classroom or clinical activities without writing code.

Actuators, power, and compute

NAO uses roughly two dozen Maxon and Portescap brush coreless DC motors across five motor families, driven through custom PWM controllers with magnetic rotary encoders providing 0.1° position feedback. Onboard compute is an Intel Atom E3845 quad-core at 1.91 GHz with 4 GB DDR3 and 32 GB eMMC flash. Power is a 21.6 V, 2.9 Ah lithium-ion pack delivering 62.5 Wh — good for approximately 60 minutes of active use or 90 minutes of light use, with a 90-minute recharge. Pepper's larger 795 Wh pack targets a full retail shift.

Even at these modest power levels, the electronics BOM is dense. Each joint's driver stage combines a low-voltage BLDC or brush-DC gate-driver IC, current-sense resistors, and precision passives on every commutation and encoder channel. Reliable operation across 25 joints — plus the sonar transceivers, MEMS microphones, IMU, capacitive touch controllers, and the multi-cell battery-management IC that supervises the 6-series lithium pack — depends on a long tail of active and passive components. On Pepper's mobile base, wide-bandgap (SiC and GaN) power devices, MLCC capacitors, and precision resistors in the motor-driver stages carry the extra load of a 30 kg omnidirectional platform.

The robotics supply chain — where Hybrid Electronics fits in

A modern humanoid robot is one of the most component-dense products ever built. A single NAO-class platform depends on thousands of individual electronic components: precision brush and coreless DC motor drivers, magnetic rotary encoders, IMUs and force-sensitive resistors, sonar transceivers, MEMS microphone arrays, capacitive touch controllers, 5-megapixel CMOS image sensors, Intel Atom-class compute boards, multi-cell battery-management ICs, wide-bandgap SiC and GaN power semiconductors on larger platforms like Pepper, high-speed board-to-board connectors, precision resistors, and thousands of MLCC capacitors distributed across every power and signal rail.

Building — and, critically, sustaining — that kind of hardware puts enormous pressure on the electronic-components supply chain. Long-lived platforms like NAO 6 have been in production since 2018 on a BOM that includes semiconductors already flagged as end-of-life or in allocation, and thousands of academic Pepper and older-generation NAO units in the field must now be maintained by universities and research groups without factory support. R&D and field-service teams building new robotics platforms during the current humanoid AI boom face the same pressure from the opposite direction: dozens of well-funded teams chasing the same short list of high-torque BLDC drivers, precision IMUs, GPU compute modules, and automotive-grade power semiconductors, with franchise stock on many key parts now measured in months of lead time rather than weeks.

Hybrid Electronics has been sourcing electronic components for industrial and embedded systems since 1995. For robotics teams — humanoid, mobile, industrial, and research — we specialize in finding the parts you need when mainstream distribution can't:

Trademark and affiliation notice. Aldebaran®, NAO®, Pepper®, Plato, Choregraphe, and NAOqi are trademarks of Aldebaran SAS, Maxtronics Robotics SAS, or their respective successor owners. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or authorized by Aldebaran, Maxtronics, United Robotics Group, or SoftBank Robotics. All information on this page is compiled from public sources for educational and reference purposes.