Aldebaran

Aldebaran Robotics was established in 2005 by Bruno Maisonnier, who had previously begun developing the robot under "Project Nao" in 2004. Six prototypes of Nao were designed between 2005 and 2007. In March 2008, the first production version of the robot, the Nao RoboCup Edition, was released to the contestants of that year's RoboCup. The Nao Academics Edition was released to universities, educational institutions and research laboratories in late 2008.

In the summer of 2010, Nao made global headlines with a synchronized dance routine at the Shanghai Expo in China. In October 2010, the University of Tokyo purchased 30 Nao robots for their Nakamura Lab, with hopes of developing the robots into active laboratory assistants. In December 2010, a Nao robot was demonstrated doing a stand-up comedy routine, and a new version of the robot was released, featuring sculpted arms and improved motors. In May 2011, Aldebaran announced that it would release Nao's controlling source code to the public as open source software. In June 2011, Aldebaran raised US$13 million in a round of venture funding led by Intel Capital. In 2013, Aldebaran was acquired by Japan's SoftBank Mobile for US$100 million.

In December 2011, Aldebaran released the Nao Next Gen, featuring hardware and software enhancements such as high-density cameras, improved robustness, anti-collision systems and a faster walking speed. The Nao Evolution, featuring enhanced durability, improved multilingual speech synthesis, improved shape and facial detection and recognition using new algorithms, and improved sound source location using four directional microphones, was released in June 2014.

Aldebaran Robotics was acquired by SoftBank Group in 2015 and rebranded as SoftBank Robotics. In July 2022, the French company was sold to United Robotics Group and rebranded Aldebaran again.

In June 2025, it was reported that Aldebaran (formerly SoftBank Robotics Europe), the company behind NAO, entered receivership in France. The legal filing raised uncertainty over the future of the NAO and Pepper platforms, which had not seen major hardware upgrades since 2018.

The next month, the assets of Aldebaran were bought by Maxvision Technologies, a Chinese company, which created a dedicated new branch in France, Maxtronics, to carry on development on Aldebaran's robots.

Late 2025, Maxtronics announced to continue NAO6 distribution, development and support with some former Aldebaran employees.

NAO6 is compatible with generative AI through NAO Activities to allow non-technical users to use NAO, like teachers in K12 Education or caregivers in Healthcare area.

The Nao robot is controlled by a specialized Linux-based operating system, dubbed NAOqi. The OS powers the robot's multimedia system, which includes four microphones (for voice recognition and sound localization), two speakers (for multilingual text-to-speech synthesis) and two HD cameras (for computer vision, including facial and shape recognition). The robot also comes with a software suite that includes a graphical programming tool dubbed Choregraphe, a simulation software package and a software developer's kit. Nao is furthermore compatible with the Microsoft Robotics Studio, Cyberbotics Webots, and the Gostai Studio (URBI).

In August 2018, RobotLAB released Engage! K12. It is an online learning platform for schools that enhance the use of NAO for STEM, Coding and Engineering. In February 2018, Finnish company Utelias Technologies released Elias Robot, a learning application that helps to learn languages with NAO.