NAO7

NAO7 is the announced successor to NAO6, and its interest lies as much in what happened around it as in the robot itself. Aldebaran published the project page on 9 December 2024. Two months later the company entered receivership in France, and in July 2025 its patents, source code and stock were auctioned to the Shenzhen-listed Maxvision Technology, which continues the line through a French subsidiary, Maxtronics Robotics SAS in Issy-les-Moulineaux. The NAO7 page survived the change of hands and was last revised on 31 July 2026 — the new owner keeps the project alive on paper, but still states plainly that the price and the release date have not been announced. What the maker does describe is a list of targeted fixes rather than a new machine. The head gets a new CPU/GPU architecture, new sensors, modern cameras for people and object detection, and six microphones instead of NAO6's four. The lower legs get new actuators and time-of-flight sensors so the robot can see obstacles while walking — something NAO6, with two forward sonars, does poorly. The hands are new and can point a finger. A touchscreen on the torso takes over robot management, application launching and settings. The battery is described as higher-capacity, with longer operating time, a deep-sleep mode and easier charging. On the software side the maker promises an easier SDK, a Choregraphe-like editor and a modern Python API. The most consequential claim is the one about artificial intelligence: computer vision, speech recognition and language models are to run fully on the robot, with no cloud dependency. For NAO's actual customers — schools, hospitals and nursing homes, where sending a child's or a patient's voice to a remote server is a legal problem before it is a technical one — that is worth more than any specification. The company frames the whole roadmap the same way, as fifteen years of field complaints answered one by one, and puts compliance with European certification on the same footing as capability. There are no numbers yet: no height, no mass, no degrees of freedom, no runtime, no price. Until Maxtronics publishes a datasheet, NAO7 is a stated intention by a company that has owned the product for a year and has so far shipped only its predecessor. This profile will be updated when figures appear; the NAO6 profile remains the one describing a robot you can actually buy.

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