NAO Robot C++ SDK and qiBuild: Complete Developer Guide 2026\n

What Happened to the Aldebaran Developer Community

If you followed a link to community.aldebaran-robotics.com and reached nothing, you are not alone. The original Aldebaran developer community — the forum and documentation hub that hosted NAO SDK guides, qiBuild tutorials, and C++ API references — has been offline since Aldebaran SAS entered judicial receivership in June 2025. The domain is no longer resolving.

The community was first migrated to community.ald.softbankrobotics.com after SoftBank acquired Aldebaran in 2015, and that mirror is also now a tombstone page. For developers maintaining NAO-based projects in universities and research labs, the loss of those original installation guides is a real problem.

This guide reconstructs the key information: how to set up the NAO C++ SDK with qiBuild, where to find working downloads in 2026, and what modern alternatives look like for teams that need a reproducible build environment.

NAOqi and the NAO C++ SDK: The Basics

NAO runs NAOqi, Aldebaran’s robotics middleware. NAOqi exposes a module-based API over a network bus called qi (later renamed libqi). Every behavior on the robot — motion, speech, vision, sensors — is a NAOqi module you can call from code running either on the robot itself or on a connected workstation.

The C++ SDK gives you full access to this API at native speed. It is the right choice when you need:

• On-robot behaviors that must run embedded (no external PC dependency)
• Real-time motion control or sensor loops with tight latency requirements
• Integration with OpenCV or other compute-heavy libraries
• Building custom NAOqi modules loaded by the robot at startup

Python is easier for prototyping, but C++ is what you reach for when performance or deployment independence matters. The Python SDK and C++ SDK share the same NAOqi API surface; the difference is only in language and the build toolchain required.

qiBuild: What It Is and Why Aldebaran Needed It

Cross-compiling C++ for NAO is not trivial. The robot runs an Atom-based CPU on a custom Linux image, which means code compiled on your laptop will not run on the robot without targeting the right architecture and linking against the correct libraries.

Aldebaran built qiBuild to solve this. qiBuild is a wrapper around CMake that automates toolchain management for cross-compilation. It introduces the concept of a toolchain — a bundle containing the cross-compiler, sysroot, and all SDK libraries pre-built for the target platform. Once you have a toolchain, qiBuild handles the rest: find dependencies, invoke CMake with the right flags, produce a binary that runs on the robot.

qiBuild is open-source and still available on GitHub at github.com/aldebaran/qibuild. The repository has not been archived. While Aldebaran no longer maintains it actively, the tool works for NAO v5 and v6 targets when paired with the correct SDK.

Getting the NAO C++ SDK in 2026

The official NAO SDK downloads were previously hosted on the Aldebaran developer portal and later on the SoftBank Robotics support center. As of 2026 these are the reliable sources:

• SoftBank Robotics EMEA support — softbankrobotics.com/emea/en/support/nao-6/downloads-softwares/ still lists NAO 6 SDK packages including the C++ cross-compilation toolkit (CTC).
• Aldebaran GitHub — github.com/aldebaran hosts nao6-binaries and nao6-doc-sdk repositories with binary releases for NAO 6.
• CMU mirror — Carnegie Mellon hosts an older NAO 1.12 reference at cs.cmu.edu/~cga/nao/doc/. Useful for legacy v4/v5 API reference but not for SDK downloads.

For NAO v4 and v5, the last installable NAOqi version is 2.1.4.13. NAO v6 supports the current NAOqi 2.8 line. Make sure your SDK version matches your robot’s firmware.

Step-by-Step: Setting Up qiBuild for NAO

These steps apply to Linux (Ubuntu 20.04 or 22.04 recommended). macOS works as well. Windows is not supported for cross-compilation.

1. Install qiBuild

qiBuild requires Python 3 and CMake. Install via pip:

pip install qibuild
qibuild config --wizard

The wizard asks about your default IDE and CMake generator. Accept defaults unless you have a specific preference.

2. Download the Cross-Toolchain (CTC)

The cross-toolchain is the compiler suite targeting NAO’s Atom processor. Download the CTC package for your target NAOqi version from SoftBank Robotics support. Unpack it to a stable location such as ~/nao-ctc/.

3. Create a qiBuild toolchain

qitoolchain create cross-atom ~/nao-ctc/toolchain.xml

This registers the toolchain under the name cross-atom. qiBuild stores this configuration in ~/.config/qi/.

4. Initialize a qiBuild workspace

mkdir ~/nao-workspace
cd ~/nao-workspace
qibuild init

5. Create and build a project

cd ~/nao-workspace
qisrc create myproject
cd myproject
qibuild configure -c cross-atom
qibuild make -c cross-atom

The -c cross-atom flag tells qiBuild to use the NAO cross-toolchain. The resulting binary targets the robot’s architecture.

Deploying to the Robot

Once built, copy the binary to the robot via scp and run it over SSH. For persistent behaviors that start automatically, you install the module into the robot’s NAOqi module path and register it in the autoload.ini configuration file.

A typical deploy workflow for development iterations:

scp build-cross-atom/sdk/bin/mymodule nao@ROBOT_IP:/home/nao/
ssh nao@ROBOT_IP "./mymodule"

For production deployment, Choregraphe packages (.pml files) are the standard mechanism and allow installing C++ behaviors alongside Python scripts and behavior trees.

Modern Alternative: Docker for Reproducible Builds

One hard lesson from the Aldebaran community closure is what happens when your build environment lives only on your machine and one aging wiki. Docker containers solve this by capturing the entire toolchain as code.

Several community members have published Docker images with qiBuild and the NAO CTC pre-installed. The Social Robot project maintains a GitHub Actions workflow that builds NAO body applications in CI for every commit — no local qiBuild setup required. Search for nao-robot docker qibuild on GitHub to find current maintained options.

Using Docker also means your CI pipeline produces signed, versioned artifacts. For a university robotics lab with multiple students maintaining a codebase, this is significantly more reliable than passing around a VM with a qiBuild installation from 2016.

Community Resources That Still Work in 2026

The original community.aldebaran-robotics.com and its SoftBank successor are gone, but the NAO developer community did not disappear entirely:

• GitHub Aldebaran org — active issues and discussion on libqi, qibuild, and libqi-python
• NAO Developers group on Reddit — r/NAO and r/robotics have threads on qiBuild troubleshooting
• ROS community — the naoqi_driver ROS2 package is maintained and has active maintainers on GitHub
• Pepper & NAO forum archive — the Internet Archive has significant portions of the old community.ald.softbankrobotics.com forum crawled before shutdown
• SoftBank Robotics Developer Center — developer.softbankrobotics.com still has NAO 6 documentation including qiBuild tutorials

Summary

The Aldebaran developer community site going offline is frustrating but not a dead end for NAO C++ development. qiBuild still works, the SDK is available via SoftBank Robotics support and GitHub, and the build process is well-documented enough to reconstruct from primary sources. For new projects, wrapping qiBuild in a Docker container makes the build environment portable and version-controlled — something the original community wiki never offered.

If you inherited a research project that linked to community.aldebaran-robotics.com for its setup instructions, this guide covers everything those pages contained and then some.