Smartphone-based Home Robotics

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel humanoid robot architecture powered by smartphones, leveraging their widespread adoption and app ecosystem to reduce costs and enhance functionality.

Contribution

It introduces a new smartphone-based architecture for humanoid robots, achieving significant cost reduction and cross-platform compatibility.

Findings

3x cost reduction compared to traditional robots

Compatible with iOS and Android platforms

Demonstrates feasibility of using smartphones as main compute units

Abstract

Humanoid robotics is a promising field because the strong human preference to interact with anthropomorphic interfaces. Despite this, humanoid robots are far from reaching main stream adoption and the features available in such robots seem to lag that of the latest smartphones. A fragmented robot ecosystem and low incentives to developers do not help to foster the creation of Robot-Apps either. In contrast, smartphones enjoy high adoption rates and a vibrant app ecosystem (4M apps published). Given this, it seems logical to apply the mobile SW and HW development model to humanoid robots. One way is to use a smartphone to power the robot. Smartphones have been embedded in toys and drones before. However, they have never been used as the main compute unit in a humanoid embodiment. Here, we introduce a novel robot architecture based on smartphones that demonstrates x3 cost reduction and that is compatible with iOS/Android.