OpenBot: Turning Smartphones into Robots | AI2

Embodied AI Lecture Series @ PRIOR Visit for the full list of our lectures OpenBot: Turning Smartphones into Robots Matthias Mueller • Intelligent Systems Lab at Intel • (7/23/21) 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