Illusionist VS Roboticist

"The main difference between the robotics researcher and the illusionist stands in their approach of building the illusion.
The magician uses a mind trick to present something that he knows to be a “lie” as a true fact. 
The robotic researcher tries to create real magic, not to have the people think he is flying, but to fly for real. 
When I design the brain of a robot, I do not want people to think it is intelligent, I want it to be so."

I have been producing a few videos to explain an experiment, a behavior or a specific skill of a robotic platform. While trying to present in the most pretty way, I always reminded to stay within the boundaries of truth. However, when you are granted with a robot, you get something like a puppet: you can manipulate its motors in order to produce animations of amazing quality (like a dance, or gestures...).

I see more and more videos taking advantage of this to try to fool people about the skills of the robot. In the following video, try to understand what is true and what is fake.

For having worked with the Nao intensively I can assure one thing: all this video is made of prerecorded animations and no intelligence at all. Moreover this robot cannot walk or use motors for more than 30mn before overheating...

All that to say: do not trust whatever you see which contains robots. The most crappy videos may actually be the one which involve the most ground breaking technology. Apart from that I have nothing against the Nao and it is really a great educational platform :-)