Always wanted to use smart phones as robot brains. These technology packed mobile devices have lots of built-in abilities that a robot brain would die for, GPS, gyro, internet access, camera, size, low-cost and many more. Extended from my thesis research, an iPhone robot is here~
In order to make the phone take to the motors underneath, I used photo diodes to read the brightness of different sections of the iPhone screen. That way I can have it communicate with external hardwares by setting up my own protocols. This is the first prototype of iBot focus on enabling mobility. The current built users have to manually control iBot’s movement by tabbing on an custom iPhone app that controls a slave mobile unit built with Arduino. My next step is looking into computer vision so this tiny little robot knows where he is going, or who he is going to.