Using ROS on Nao

General
1

Hi there, I’m investigating using ROS with Nao robots for a project but have a few questions that I can’t seem to find answers for online.

First, do the official ROS Nao packages support Nao v4 or are v5 required?

Second, it looks like it is possible to have ROS running directly on the robot itself, but is not the preferred method. How feasible actually is it to have ROS installed and running on the robot? How well does it work? Are there pre-compiled binaries for it or would we need to cross-compile it, as suggested by one of the tutorials?

Any advice about this would be greatly appreciated!

//Mike

2

Hi @mjog,

Thanks for your question.
However ROS Discourse is for news and general interest discussions. ROS Answers
http://answers.ros.org/ provides a forum which can be filtered by tags to
make sure the relevant people can find and/or answer the question, and not
overload everyone with hundreds of posts. So we recommend users to ask their questions there following our support guidelines:
http://wiki.ros.org/Support.
For NAO (or Pepper/Romeo) related question you may also find answers to your questions on the dedicated mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/ros-sig-aldebaran/

To not leave you empty handed :wink: :

  • ROS Nao packages should work on v4 and v5
  • Nao has a very limited processing power so running the ROS machinery on top of the Naoqi one gets challenging. But is you don’t do expensive processing you should be able to run some nodes directly on the robot. Some people give additional computing power to Nao to avoid the remote processing (see the nao backpack project for example)
  • There are no pre-compiled binaries AFAIK, but you can use the OpenNao VM to compile your packages for the target architecture

Hope this helps,

3

Thanks for the tip about answers, and thanks for the information, very useful!