Researchers unveil low-cost two-legged robot that carries and positions your smartphone
Scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles have built a 19-inch, four-pound robot called PhoneBot that can hold a smartphone, follow a user and aim the camera for photos.
A research team from the University of California, Los Angeles introduced PhoneBot, a compact humanoid robot roughly 19 inches tall and weighing about four pounds. The robot integrates a commodity smartphone at its torso, using the phone’s camera and motion sensors to detect and follow people, while an onboard computer relays Wi-Fi commands to 13 motors that drive its legs and torso rotation. In early tests the robot could walk beside a user, track their movements, stand up after falling face-down and position its camera to keep subjects in frame, and it can react to voice commands though the speech AI runs on a separate laptop.
PhoneBot costs around $400 and is open-source, aiming to provide an affordable platform for teaching and rapid robotics prototyping. Future work includes adding lightweight manipulators and testing the robot on non-flat surfaces, as well as moving speech-recognition processing onto the phone itself.
Why it matters
The robot demonstrates a cheap, smartphone-based approach to humanoid robotics, potentially widening access for education and research.
In this story
