UCLA's PhoneBot is an open-source humanoid robot that uses old Android phones as its brain
Researchers at UCLA have developed PhoneBot, an open-source humanoid robot that stands 483 mm tall and weighs 1.8 kg. It uses four tested Android handsets — including a 2017 Honor 9 and three $50–$80 models — for camera-based person tracking, inertial sensing and TensorFlow Lite locomotion control, while a separate onboard computer handles motor communications. The team trained its walking controller with reinforcement learning and mirrored training samples and reported improved gait symmetry; the platform costs about $400 excluding the phone but is limited to flat-ground walking, low-power servos and no arms.
The project shows that a low-cost, reproducible humanoid research platform can use commodity smartphone sensors and TensorFlow Lite for perception and learned walking, which the authors say lets others modify and investigate smartphone-based robotics.
- 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.
#PhoneBot#University of California Los Angeles#Android#TensorFlow Lite#Honor 9#arXiv