In this work we present the head assembly and the gaze shifting capabilities of the bipedal humanoid robot Romeo. The purpose of the head system is to provide a reliable hardware platform for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) applications, stereo vision based navigation or gazing experiments, either as stand-alone version or in synergy with the body movements. Towards this purpose, the number of joints, the angular range, speed and acceleration of the eyes and neck rotations should be should be in agreement with human psychophysics, i.e. reproducing realistic kinematics. We present a mechatronic system of the head and neck; accompanied by experimental results of head-fixed eye movements, solely head rotations, as well as eye-head cooperative motion for large angles of gaze shifting. We compare the values achieved by the prototype, with those of an average adult human.

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.