OpenBot: Turning Smartphones into Robots
This work addresses the cost and capability limitations of current robots for researchers and hobbyists, offering a low-cost, accessible solution with demonstrated performance.
The authors tackled the problem of expensive or sensor-limited robots by developing OpenBot, a $50 electric vehicle body that uses standard Android smartphones to provide rich sensors, computational power, and communication, enabling advanced tasks like person following and real-time autonomous navigation in unstructured environments.
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