Our Aldebaran Nao robot has recently had some issues. Since we are about 6 years out of warranty, and the alternative was an expensive paperweight, we’ve had to fix all problems ourselves. See the post on how we repaired Nao’s Battery Pack for the previous fix we did on Nao. Many years ago, when Nao was under warranty we did send him to France to fix his rather fragile finger which broke during a fall.
There’s not a lot of information out there about the inner workings of Nao.
Booting failure
When I turned Nao on for my project on GPT3.5 he took a really long time to start and then vocalised this error message:
We assumed Nao had had some kind of disk failure. My husband remembered that Nao had some kind of sd card onboard and we wondered if that had become corrupted.
We took the difficult decision to open up nao’s head to see if we could find anything wrong or replace the sd card.
We also noticed there was a battery of the board we removed from Nao’s head, and ordered a new one to replace it.
I would like to say we replaced the sd card and everything was ok again, but we actually accidentally replaced the sd card with the old card instead of the new one! Omg, we were so annoyed when we realised that!
When we closed Nao up we decided to try to reload the image to Nao and hopefully that would fix the error we’d been getting.
You can find instructions on how to do that here for example.
Thankfully our nao started up again and we had no more issues with the corrupted user sector!
The broken finger
While I was working with Nao for my ChatGPT project, on startup Nao tends to stand up. Recently our Nao has had difficulty sitting or standing as it is quite old, and the joints seem to get stuck.
In attempting to stand, Nao fell and broke a finger.
The plastic had completely split through and a spring and a pin fell out.
We discussed several ways of fixing the finger, like super glue, or printing a replacement if we could find a model for it, but we couldn’t find one.
Eventually we just decided to tape it back together – to allow for flexibility but still keep the mechanics together.
It was quite nerve-wracking to put the spring back in position between the holders for the pin and push the pin through the holders and through the spring, then get the pin back into its casing! The spring still juts out of the casing and we has as yet to see the fixed finger in action so hold thumbs (or fingers) that it works!
It would be so great if we could get a service for our Nao but this is not offered by Aldebaran. One day we might take it all apart and grease it properly but in the mean time I suppose we will combat it’s obsoletion one fix at a time.
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