UCLA's PhoneBot turns a smartphone into a 19-inch walking humanoid
According to The Rundown AI, UCLA researchers built PhoneBot, a roughly 19-inch humanoid with a smartphone for a brain and about $400 in extra hardware, using 13 motors to walk, swivel its torso and push itself upright after falling face-down. Four Android phones handled core sensing, vision and movement control, including a 2017 Honor 9 that lacked the services needed for onboard mapping; the team corrected an uneven gait with mirrored training examples that swapped left and right. It has no arms, has only been trained to walk on flat ground, and needs a separate laptop for speech recognition and its language model. The same roundup notes a Tesla patent application for flexible touch-sensing robot skin (filed Sept. 11, 2025, published Oct. 8, 2026, not granted) and EPFL's threadlike FiberMotor for wearable robotics.
It extends the 2020 OpenBot idea of phone-as-brain to the harder problem of balancing on legs, potentially giving students and small labs a cheap foothold in humanoid robotics.