INTERVIEW The Interplay of Aldebaran and RoboCup Interview with Rodolphe Gelin, Executive Vice President-Chief Scientific Officer, Aldebaran Robotics Alexander Ferrein 1 • Gerald Steinbauer 2 Published online: 25 July 2016 Ó Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016 Rodolphe Gelin (1965) started his career at CEA (French Atomic Energy Commission), he has been working there for 10 years on mobile robots control for indus- trial applications and on rehabilitation robotics. Then he had been in charge of different teams working on robotics, vir- tual reality and cognitics. In 2009, he joined SoftBank Robotics as head of collabo- rative projects. He is the leader of the French project ROMEO that aims to develop a human size humanoid robot. Since 2016, he is Chief Scientist Officer at SoftBank Robotics. KI: Mr. Gelin, the cooperation of Aldebaran Robotics and RoboCup seems to be quite beneficial for both sides. How important as a testbed and marketing platform was the RoboCup for the success of the humanoid robot Nao? The RoboCupers were our first customers. In 2006, when the Robocup organizers were looking for a platform for the standard platform league (former four-legged lea- gue), Nao was just a fragile prototype but convincing enough to be selected. Then it had been the rush to deliver the Nao teams to the seven competitors of the standard platform league. With the RoboCupers we discovered the way ‘‘non Aldebaran’’ people were using intensively our robots. This population of users was representative of what became our main market for Nao: research and education. Our engineers spent a lot of time with the RoboCupers to assist them in programming (and fixing) the robots. Two major features of Nao are directly coming from the RoboCup experience: the bottom camera that was added for the detection of close balls and the stand up procedure. The RoboCupers imagined a very fast, efficient and elegant way for Nao to recover after a fall. For a long time, it has been the official stand up behavior of Nao. The very good visibility of the RoboCup in the academic community gave definitively a strong marketing advantage to Nao. KI: What do you think in terms of research and edu- cation is the unique selling point of RoboCup from the perspective of a successful robotics company? The robotic industry will need more engineers, more developers, more trained people in the future. For the students, the RoboCup is an exciting challenge to discover everything that makes the beauty of the robotics: the ‘‘perception, decision and action’’ loop. A good RoboCup developer is, for sure, a good candidate to work in a robotic company. ‘‘The RoboCupers imagined a very fast, efficient and elegant way for Nao to recover after a fall. For a long time, it has been the official stand up behavior of Nao.’’ & Alexander Ferrein ferrein@fh-aachen.de Gerald Steinbauer steinbauer@ist.tugraz.at 1 Mobile Autonomous Systems and Cognitive Robotics Institute, FH Aachen University of Applied Sciences, Eupener Strasse 70, 52066 Aachen, Germany 2 Institute for Software Technology, Graz University of Technology, Inffeldgasse 16b/2, 8010 Graz, Austria 123 Ku ¨nstl Intell (2016) 30:325–326 DOI 10.1007/s13218-016-0440-1