We created a library of emotional expressions, and not an emotional system, for the humanoid robot Nao from Aldebaran Robotics. This set of expressions could be used by robot behavior designers to create advanced behaviors, or by an emotion simulator. It is an insight into a conjoint work between an invited anthropologist and robotics researchers which resulted in about a hundred animations. We do not provide a review of the literature.

This article presents the mechatronic design of the autonomous humanoid robot called NAO that is built by the French company Aldebaran-Robotics. With its height of 0.57 m and its weight about 4.5 kg, this innovative robot is lightweight and compact. It distinguishes itself from existing humanoids thanks to its pelvis kinematics design, its proprietary actuation system based on brush DC motors, its electronic, computer and distributed software architectures. This robot has been designed to be affordable without sacrificing quality and performance. It is an open and easy-to-handle platform. The comprehensive and functional design is one of the reasons that helped select NAO to replace the AIBO quadrupeds in the 2008 RoboCup standard league.

In this paper, we present Choregraphe: a graphical environment developed by Aldebaran Robotics for programming its humanoid robot, Nao. Choregraphe is a very powerful tool that allows macroscopic connection of high level behaviors to easily develop complex software for this 25 degrees of freedom robot. But it offers as well the ability to perform fine tuning of complex joint or Cartesian motions. At the lowest level, Choregraphe allows programming in Python.