French Telepresence Robot Gostai Jazz

Gostai is a French robot manufacturer and an editor of innovative software for robotics & Artificial Intelligence. The new Jazz robots line is Gostai’s flagship, with business applications in telepresence and telesurveillance. Jazz integrates Gostai’s innovative softwares. Gostai also develops the Urbi open source operating system for robotics, as well as Gostai Suite, a suite of graphical programming tools for robotics and complex system, and the GostaiNet cloud computing architecture for robotics.


The Gostai Jazz is an autonomous service robot for telepresence in business and security. The Gostai Jazz robot is 1 meter in height and mobile. It is fitted with a camera and include Wi-Fi connectivity. The user can connect to the robot via a web browser and can control it from afar, allowing them to see what the robot’s camera sees in real time. They can also hear what’s going on and can communicate through an embedded loudspeaker. Jazz Connect was designed specifically for business conferencing. The company believes the units could be useful for organisations wishing to reduce their carbon footprints and could reduce travel costs for frequent flyers.

Jazz Security can be used as a form of guard robot. It can patrol autonomously at night using an infrared camera and a map of its surroundings, as well as a laser system to help it localise things. The robot detects suspicious moves to help a night watchman or traditional alarm system. A teleoperator can control it any time there is an alert. Jazz Security can also send SMS alerts if it detects an intruder and LED power lights to illuminate dark areas. Jazz Icon, a much more detailed unit designed to promote a brand or image at points of sales and fairs. Jazz Connect and Icon are available from €7,900. Icon can be rented from €1,800. Jazz Security is available from €8,400.

Urbi Robotic Software Platform Goes Open Source

Open Source Robotics (OSR) is an emerging technology trend to broaden the development basis for next generation robotics. Leading robot engineers believe in the development of a standardised robot based on an open-source operating system in order to kick-start the mass production of next generation service robots. Advantages with OSR are lower development costs, interchangeability and platform independability.

French robotics developer Gostai has announced that its core Urbi Operating System for robotics is now going open source. Urbi is an advanced robotics operating system, already available for a large number of robots like Aldebaran® Nao, Segway® RMP or Lego® Mindstorm, among 15 other different robots. One of its main innovations lies in a new orchestration script language called urbiscript, which natively integrates parallelism and event-based programming. Next to Urbi, Gostai also offers the Gostai Studio graphical programming tools, and compatibility with various simulators, making the Urbi framework one of the most advanced and complete solution for robot and complex system programming available today. Urbi is also very simple to use, even for beginners. It is perfectly suitable for advanced industrial or academics applications, as well as for the educational market.

The source code is covered by an Affero GNU GPL v3 license and is available for immediate download and use from Gostai’s website. This initiative will allow developers worldwide to participate in the growth of the industry's most innovative robotic software solution.

Other Open Source Robotics initiatives are i.e. the European OROCOS (Open RObot COntrol Software) project, OpenJAUS, ROS (Robot Operating System) open-source software running on the Willow Garage robots.

Gostai wins Microsoft ACES 2009 Award

French Gostai wins the ACES 2009 Microsoft ICT Academic Enterprise Awards Europe. This prize awards a successful company spin out from academics research, ENSTA Paristech Cognitive Robotics Lab in the case of Gostai.

The core technology is URBI, the Universal Real-time Behavior Interface which is a powerful parallel script engine coupled with the UObject component architecture, usable to control hardware and software components in a flexible and portable way.

The cognitive robotics researchers at ENSTA ParisTech are working on perception and machine learning to endow robots with capabilities to work autonomously and in interaction with humans. One of the main research topic is the problem of grounding symbols in perception in the framework of developmental robotics. We are also working on mobile robot navigation and Human-Robot interaction.