Upgrading your robot

Why upgrading your robot

Several situations may require an upgrade of OpenNAO, the robot embedded Operating System:

  • you have lost your password and cannot anymore connect to the robot Web page,
  • you want to reset your robot to a known state,
  • a new release is available,
  • something goes wrong and the robot does not boot normally anymore.

How to upgrade your robot

Getting ready to upgrade

Step Action

Check the battery level.

Important: make sure the robot battery is fully charged: a power shortage during upgrading could leave the robot in a fatal state.

Tips: if your battery has a limited autonomy, you should leave the charger plugged during the upgrade. However it could be wise to order a new battery.

Make sure the sound level is high.

A very sensitive step will be prompted by a sound, you need to hear it.

Upload the new release on the robot.

Choose among these 3 methods:

If you do not know which one to choose, see: Choosing relevant upgrading method.

Launching the upgrade

In all cases, at the end of the upload process, you shutdown your robot (when prompted by Choregraphe, or before inserting the USB stick updated by the NAOFlasher).

Then you have to:

Step Action

Turn on and update the firmware.

NAO V4.0: press and hold the robot Chest button for about 5 seconds until it gets blue.

NAO V3.x: press the robot Chest button.

Ear LEDs shows the progression: Ears on upgrade.

Remain alert: a strong beep sound (echoing), indicates that one of the cards has its firmware updated. This could occur once or several times according to the release content (i.e. the number of firmwares to update).

Warning: it may occur, on some robots, that the upgrade of the card controlling the Inertial sensor gets disturbed when the charger is plugged. In that case, the upgrade will be retried, up to 6 times, so you should hear the sound many times.

Tips: in order to avoid this problem, simply unplug the charger once you have heard the first sound.
Optionally, in case of persistent disturbances NAO may say: “To complete my upgrade, please make sure that I am well charged, unplug my charger and re-boot me”.

When the upgrade process is completed, NAO may ask you to perform an auto-diagnostic by saying: “put me in an open space on the floor and touch my head or my bumper ...”.

If you don’t feel confident about the upgrade, for example if a repeated sound makes you think that the inertial sensor card may not be properly updated, do not proceed as asked and shutdown the robot: It gives you another chance to perform the upgrade properly.

Last checking

The tricky upgrade of the Inertial sensor card could put your robot in danger, so better double-check that everything went well before performing acrobatics!

So make sure the Fall Manager reflex is activated or at least available on the Settings.

Choosing relevant upgrading method

There are several ways of upgrading OpenNAO, some keeps all settings, others reset all settings to the factory ones.

To update NAO system, choose carefully between these methods:

If your robot ... Then choose a ...

is booting normally

and you need to:

  • restore the current release or
  • upgrade it

is not booting normally

or you would like to downgrade the current release
  • Complete update in a rescue mode, using NAOFlasher with Factory Reset.
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