PhoneBot uses an old $50 Android smartphone brain with its cameras as eyes — tech Frankenstein is an open source…

• PhoneBot uses cheap Android smartphones for vision, sensing, and walking control
• UCLA researchers built a humanoid robot with approximately $400 in hardware
• Four Android phones handled PhoneBot’s core sensing and computing tasks

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), have developed PhoneBot, a compact humanoid robot that reuses cheap smartphones for sensing and computing.

The open source platform costs approximately $400 for its robotic hardware, excluding the phone, making it considerably cheaper than several existing small humanoid research systems.

PhoneBot stands 483 mm tall, weighs 1.8 kg, and uses 13 servo motors to control its legs and rotating torso during movement.

Old smartphones handle vision, computing and robot control

Instead of requiring dedicated cameras, motion sensors and an expensive onboard computer, PhoneBot relies on the smartphone's existing hardware for these functions.

Its camera tracks people, while the built-in inertial measurement unit supplies motion information that helps the robot...

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