NAO - How to preserve the battery life cycle / is it Out Of Order ?

Modified on Wed, 6 Mar at 3:11 PM

This article will give you a few tips to:

perserve the NAO battery life cycle,
determine if the battery is defective or when it has reached the end of its life cycle and needs to be replaced.

How to preserve it ?

First and foremost, always use the charger and cables supplied in the NAO cardboard box :

Any other type of charger is not recommended.

It is highly recommended that you do a full recharge of the battery at least once every 3 month.

This type of battery includes a BMS board (Battery Management Sytem) that consumes power from the battery. So it will reach a low charge level even if you don't use NAO.

A long period of no recharge can activate a "Deep Discharge state" safety on the BMS board.
This means the battery charge is considered to be too low.
This safety will lock the battery, making it impossible to recharge again.

Is the battery defective or has reached its life cycle limit ?

Some symptoms will mean that a battery needs to be replaced.

These symptoms are:

NAOqi Operating System crashes as soon as you try to activate NAO's joints (usually, a hissing sound coming from the robot can be heard when it happens)
NAO automatically shuts down as soon as the charger cable is unplugged,
NAO cannot be used if the charger is not plugged to the battery,
When the charger is plugged to the battery, the LED is green even if the battery is empty.