The Robot With a Smart Phone Brain

One of the limitations of robot kits is that they can be complicated to use and build, and even the simplest ones require some hardware expertise. But now any smart phone can be a robot, thanks to the folks at Romotive.

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The concept is quite simple: put a wheeled chassis on a smart phone or iPod Touch that allows for using the device as the “brain.” But that simplicity is what makes the robot, called Romo, powerful. Since the controls are contained entirely within the phone, they can be downloaded as apps. One can add new physical capabilities to Romo -– a claw, or a scoop -– but that doesn’t require any new additions to the phone.

Also, the controls are through the headphone jack. That simplifies the design and means that the robot doesn’t need to be linked with only one brand of smart phone.

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Romotive turned to Kickstarter to raise money, and had planned to raise $32,000. They have long since passed that (hitting $92,684 on Nov. 18) and they will stop taking pledges on Nov. 21. If you pledge $78 before then, you get a Romo and $141 gets two.

So what can you do with a smart phone-based robot? The founders of Romotive, Peter Seid and Phu Nguyen, have come up with a few applications. At this point they have a racing game and you can program your Romo to carry an iPhone around as a kind of spying tool (the view from the floor isn’t as useful as it might be, but that isn’t the point). On their site they ask both software and hardware hackers to come up with more software and share their findings with others.

Keller Rinaudo, CEO of Robomotive, told Discovery blogger Eric Rogell that while the Romo doesn't yet have many specific tasks in mind, that could change fast, just as it did with personal computers:

“It was basically geeks in garages playing with compouter chips and writing code,” says Rinaudo. “They were building computers that couldn’t do anything and the business people laughed. They’d say, ‘What is it good for? Why in the hell would anyone want a computer in their home?’ It took people hacking and believing and being nerdy enough to figure it out… and ignoring all the investors and business people. Now we say how ridiculously ignorant those investors and business people were.”