OpenBot: Turning Smartphones into Robots

TL;DR

OpenBot transforms affordable smartphones into capable robots by combining low-cost hardware with a robust software stack, enabling advanced tasks like autonomous navigation and person following in unstructured environments.

Contribution

This work introduces a novel, cost-effective robot platform using smartphones and a custom electric vehicle, expanding accessible robotics research and development.

Findings

System supports advanced robotics workloads

Robust performance across different smartphones

Cost-effective robot platform at $50

Abstract

Current robots are either expensive or make significant compromises on sensory richness, computational power, and communication capabilities. We propose to leverage smartphones to equip robots with extensive sensor suites, powerful computational abilities, state-of-the-art communication channels, and access to a thriving software ecosystem. We design a small electric vehicle that costs $50 and serves as a robot body for standard Android smartphones. We develop a software stack that allows smartphones to use this body for mobile operation and demonstrate that the system is sufficiently powerful to support advanced robotics workloads such as person following and real-time autonomous navigation in unstructured environments. Controlled experiments demonstrate that the presented approach is robust across different smartphones and robot bodies. A video of our work is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc8hFLyWDOM