UCLA Open-Sources PhoneBot: One Android Phone Replaces Five Humanoid Robot Systems

UCLA's Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory has open-sourced PhoneBot, a bipedal humanoid that uses a single $50–80 Android phone as its camera, IMU, processor, radio, and display. The build costs about $400 excluding the phone, versus $3,500–13,800 for comparable open-source bipedal platforms.

• PhoneBot stands 483 mm tall, weighs 1.8 kg, and uses 13 Dynamixel XL430-W250-T servos
• One Android phone handles vision, balance sensing, inference, Wi-Fi, and interaction
• The RL locomotion policy trained in MuJoCo/MJX runs on-device via TensorFlow Lite at 50 Hz
• Sagittal mirroring compensates for servo asymmetry during training