UCLA's PhoneBot: a $400 bipedal robot that uses your old phone as its brain

UCLA's RoMeLa lab has built PhoneBot, a 48.3-cm, 1.8-kg bipedal robot that uses a smartphone as its torso, camera and computing brain. The team estimates the hardware costs about $400 excluding the phone, versus $3,500–$13,800 for comparable small research humanoids.

• Stands 48.3 cm tall, weighs 1.8 kg and uses 13 servos: six per leg plus one torso swivel
• The phone handles camera, IMU, walking neural network and screen, talking to the board over Wi-Fi
• Tested on four Android phones, including a 2017 Honor 9 and prepaid models costing $50–80
• Walking was trained in simulation with motor limits; speech recognition and the language model run on a laptop