Six generations of the NAO humanoid robot, in classrooms since 2008. Offbrand Human

NAO is the oldest humanoid robot you can still buy. The 58 cm French biped has been shipping to schools and labs since 2008, across six hardware generations, three changes of owner and one bankruptcy, and it is on sale this morning. That makes it the closest thing this category has to a long-run price record, and the record is not flattering: the US distributor's listing has gone from $9,000 in November 2018 to $16,990 today, on a robot whose hardware has not been revised since June 2018.

What NAO costs, August 7, 2026

The maker does not sell you one. Maxtronics, which now owns the platform, lists the NAO6 with a "Get a quote" button and no number anywhere on the page. Buying means a distributor, a quote, and usually a purchase order. It is not a home robot and nobody pretends it is: Maxtronics lists the use cases as education, research, healthcare and elderly environments.

Channel	What you get	Price	Fine print
Maxtronics (maker, France)	NAO6	Quote only	No public price, no cart
RobotLAB (US distributor)	NAO V6 bundle	Starting at $16,990	Charger, battery, Choregraphe Unlimited license, SDK, curriculum PDF, "1 year + RobotLAB Support Level 1"; purchase or lease
Generation Robots (EU, France)	NAO V6	€10,020.00 including tax (€8,350.28 before tax)	Marked in stock, delivery quoted at 24 to 48 hours, 2-year warranty

Stare at the transatlantic gap for a second. A European lab pays about ten thousand euros including VAT for the robot a US school is quoted nearly seventeen thousand dollars for. Some of that is bundle, some of it is distributor, and all of it is more negotiable than the sticker admits.

The eight-year price climb, one distributor, one URL

RobotLAB has been the main US channel for NAO for years, and its product page is archived often enough to read as a price series. Same seller, same page, same robot.

Date captured	Listed price	How it was labelled
Nov 16, 2018	$9,000	Educator Pack, "In Stock", 2 years of warranty, transport case included
Aug 6, 2020	$9,000	Unchanged
Aug 17, 2022	$9,000	Standard Edition and Educator Pack both $9,000; upgrade price for V5 owners $6,500, for V4 owners $7,500
Sep 29, 2023	$12,990	"Starting from", warranty now 1 year, refurbished units offered
Oct 5, 2024	$12,900	Relabelled "NAO V6 Robot Standard Edition"
Aug 7, 2026	$16,990	"Starting at"

Flat for four years, then up 44% in one step, then up again. Nothing on the robot changed across any of it. Neither RobotLAB nor the manufacturer has published a reason for the step, so I am not going to invent one; what I can show you is the dates. The warranty moved the other way, from two years to one.

Six generations, and the number that never moved

Every generation of NAO has had 25 degrees of freedom. Two in the head, five per arm, one in the pelvis, five per leg, one per hand. A 21-joint RoboCup variant without actuated hands also existed, but the shipping robot has counted the same joints since 2008, and still does on the NAO6 datasheet (model H25600): 574 x 311 x 275 mm, 5.48 kg, two 5 MP cameras, four omnidirectional microphones, and 60 minutes of active use per charge, 90 minutes of normal use.

Here is the whole hardware lineage, per the version table on Wikipedia's NAO entry.

Generation	Released	CPU	RAM	Battery	Weight	Joints
NAO V3+	2008	AMD Geode 500 MHz	256 MB	27.6 Wh	4.836 kg	25
NAO V3.2	2009	AMD Geode 500 MHz	256 MB	27.6 Wh	4.836 kg	25
NAO V3.3	Dec 2010	AMD Geode 500 MHz	256 MB	27.6 Wh	4.996 kg	25
NAO Next Gen (V4)	Dec 2011	Atom Z530 1.6 GHz	1 GB	27.6 Wh	5.18 kg	25
NAO Evolution (V5)	Jun 2014	Atom Z530 1.6 GHz	1 GB	48.6 Wh	5.31 kg	25
NAO6	Jun 2018	Atom E3845 1.91 GHz	4 GB	62.5 Wh	5.48 kg	25

Eighteen years bought sixteen times the RAM, 2.3 times the battery energy, and no extra joints. The runtime is the figure I would bold in a purchase order: 60 minutes of active use in 2026, the same hour the first units managed. Small humanoids are power-limited in a way no CPU upgrade fixes, which is the wall every biped on the humanoid price ladder hits at its own price point.

Who owns NAO now

Aldebaran was founded in Paris in 2005 by Bruno Maisonnier, sold to SoftBank for $100 million (accounts differ on 2012 or 2013), sold on to Germany's United Robotics Group in 2022, and rebranded back to Aldebaran. Then it ran out of road. The Robot Report reported on June 3, 2025 that a judicial panel had placed Aldebaran in receivership after a mid-February bankruptcy filing, that URG had stopped funding it in 2024, and that the company had recorded an operating loss of about $29 million the year before. The same piece has the install base: Aldebaran said it had sold about 20,000 NAO and 17,000 Pepper units into 70 countries.

Seven weeks later it had a buyer. heise online reported on July 22, 2025 that Maxvision Technology, a Chinese company, had bought the technology and IP for Pepper and NAO, planned no layoffs, would set up a French subsidiary for R&D and support, and intended to move production to China. The price was not disclosed. That subsidiary is Maxtronics, in Issy-les-Moulineaux, and the proof is a redirect: aldebaran.com now returns a 301 to maxtronics.com.

Maxvision says that on July 10, 2025 it acquired the core assets of ALDEBARAN, including the key technologies for NAO and Pepper. (@Maxvision199701, 2025-07-31)

The buyer putting its own date on the deal, twelve days before the German report of it, and naming itself as the company a NAO owner now depends on for parts.

This is where NAO differs from most of the robots in the graveyard. Its datasheet lists an embedded GNU/Linux distribution running on the robot's own processor, so the base behaviors are not sitting on a server waiting for a funding round. What a change of owner threatens is spare parts, repairs and support, not a remote kill switch. On a machine with 36 magnetic rotary encoders and a brushed DC motor per joint, that is not a footnote.

NAO7 exists on a web page

Maxtronics has published a NAO7 page: new CPU and GPU, six microphones instead of four, time-of-flight sensors, a torso touchscreen, a bigger battery, and on-device AI models for vision, speech and language with no cloud dependency. The same page says "its price and release date have not yet been announced." That is a roadmap. Do not write it into a two-year curriculum plan.

The league NAO lost

For most of two decades NAO was RoboCup's standard robot: it replaced Sony's AIBO in the Standard Platform League on August 15, 2007, and every team in that league played identical NAOs. RoboCup's Humanoid Soccer League page now says the league "was formed through the unification of the Humanoid League (HL) and Standard Platform League (SPL) and will take place for the first time at the RoboCup 2026." The old SPL page still calls the platform "currently the NAO humanoid robot manufactured by Aldebaran," which tells you how fast this happened.

Then the scoreline. On July 5, 2026 in Incheon, RoboCup ran the first full 11 versus 11 humanoid match, B-Human of Bremen 4-0 over HTWK Robots of Leipzig, and RoboCup's writeup says both sides played on robots designed by Booster Robotics. The league NAO defined now runs on somebody else's hardware.

Would I buy one

If you need a small humanoid that a room of undergraduates cannot destroy, with Python and C++ SDKs, a US support number and an enormous back catalogue of published work to build on (Maxtronics claims "more than 3 600 studies"), NAO V6 at $16,990 is still defensible, and the €10,020 listing is the better buy if you are inside that distributor's territory. If you need current hardware, that money buys a full-size Unitree G1 with all the caveats attached to it, and the rest of the institutional shortlist is priced out in humanoid robots for education and research.

Put three things in the RFQ, in writing: warranty term, spare-part lead times after the ownership change, and whether the quote covers a new or refurbished unit. Those answers matter more than any spec in the table above.