The AIBO used a proprietary commercial operating system and required a separate set of commercial compilers to produce valid code.
When I was working on it through a special arrangement with Sony Research, I made a bunch of perl scripts that could munge the assembly generated from gcc so that the assembler could generate code that worked properly on the robots, but there were still a large number of very expensive commercial licenses between it and being OS compatible.
I unfortunately can't go into much more detail than that, because I believe I'm still covered by an NDA I signed back in ~1997 :-)
That's interesting, and your Perl scripts sound like the sort of thing I would utterly fail at were I to attempt to create them. What about the hardware of the robots though? Would all of the various interesting parts be covered by patents, etc., and thus be unsuitable for opening up? (Sorry if my questions tread on NDA territory - that's one long-lived NDA.)
Not at all! It wasn't that bad -- the object files just needed to have sections that had particular size restrictions, names, etc. Nothing too tricky.
I don't recall the hardware being too separately encumbered. Sony Research provided all of the early adopters with significant technical specifications about the hardware itself, though admittedly much of it was documented in Japanese and this is ~10 years before google translate. I remember one other independent research group rewrote all of Sony's dynamic stability code and was able to increase walking speed significantly, and there was a lot of that level of information available.
IANAL, but NDAs are only enforcable when there is some actual liability on the table. Example, I'm sure the NDA for the Coca-Cola recipe is still in effect for the lifetime since they still use the formula and it would actually do financial harm if it was to be released.
In some places NDAs are invalid if they don't have an expiration term. Since Sony no longer makes the AIBO and I'm sure whatever proprietary tech it did have is out of date please, do tell.
When I was working on it through a special arrangement with Sony Research, I made a bunch of perl scripts that could munge the assembly generated from gcc so that the assembler could generate code that worked properly on the robots, but there were still a large number of very expensive commercial licenses between it and being OS compatible.
I unfortunately can't go into much more detail than that, because I believe I'm still covered by an NDA I signed back in ~1997 :-)