Openbot: Turning Smartphones into Robots | Hacker News Reader

Openbot: Turning Smartphones into Robots

openbot.org

90 pointshomarp23 comments

Similar: I recently built a fleet of telepresence robots that use smartphones to drive them: https://github.com/dheera/robot-tethys

The nice thing about smartphones for robots is that they have almost everything you'd want for a robot: GPS, IMU, 2 cameras, battery, battery charging circuitry, a high-res display, touch interface. And ALL of that for $60 -- for say a used Pixel 1. You simply cannot get that amount of hardware for $60 for a RPi-based robot.

I actually wrote all the logic in an HTML5 app running on the phone, which communicates with the motors via bluetooth using the experimental HTML5 bluetooth API. I also wrote a "roslite.js" which allows for a ROS-node-like-but-async abstraction from within a single monolithic JavaScript: https://github.com/dheera/roslite.js This wouldn't work for more advanced robots of course, but for simple telepresence and educational robots it can work while being much easier to code than an Android app.

I remember my oldest son built a mobile platform with a tablet on it, so he could bother his sister at college remotely! He put his face on it, and the tablet was on a stick that could rotate as well. that was over 5 years ago. He was 15 around then. Anything particularly novel about this platform from other phone/tablet robot projects?

The github repository is mostly empty of code. There is a project (empty) for Arduino firmware, and it looks like they are using an Arduino Nano as the device controller. And there's a project (empty) for Android code. I'd love to see actual code.

My questions would be 1) How is the Android device communicating with the Arduino device? My guess would be wi-fi or bluetooth. 2) What image recognition software did they use in the Android code 3) What other sensors on the Android did they actually use and how? 4) Is there any way to port this to IOS? 5) Is it generalizable to other hardware builds?

The hardware looks very simple. As a software developer I would want to know a lot more about how it works from the coding side.

It's a thing we've been doing for almost eleven years. Check out the actual Antbot product at https://www.robots-everywhere.com

The image recognition is almost certainly done by YOLO, perhaps ported to TFLite. The bounding box labels are quite distinctive.

The driving policy work looks new and innovative.

Why is every link on the site routing via google? Does this project -- cool as it sounds at first bite -- originate from google? Funded by google?

Routing every link through google's tracking panopticon just looks... weird. Raises questions.

It seems the website was created using Google Sites[1]

[1] https://sites.google.com/

I hope someone will create an online shop where I can purchase the custom parts!

There is, sort of. There are many people/services that will print these parts for you.

Hit up Robots Everywhere, we've been making these for 10 years.

https://www.robots-everywhere.com/products/antbot-rover

This isn't new. The Robots Anywhere system, developed by Robots Everywhere, started doing this in 2010 and demoed at Google I/O.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwfCldqmzcFZkjjnZi_IHAw

Check em out!

We've been making and selling these since the HTC G1.

https://robots-everywhere.com/

Go on the wiki for full source code and schematics.

Now if someone would just make a large lego type kit with all the robot parts, so you can plug and play and make robots using smart phones for the control unit.

Buy some wheel cubes, a couple basic cubes for a base, plug them together, plug in the cell phone via usb, go.

Instant robots everywhere. Offer arm cubes, sensor cubes, lidar cubes, all plug and play.

After watching the video I wanted to build and play with this. Impressive project and the democratization of robotics is a great mission to be on.

BTW if I wanted to buy the body (I dont have a 3d printer) is there a way to do that (or could there be through some collective scheme?)

Order the the 3D print through Shapeways or find a printer in eg. a makerspace?

Hit up Robots Everywhere, we've been making these for 10 years.

https://www.robots-everywhere.com/products/antbot-rover

You can probably modify their firmware once they get it running to run on our boards if you want.

If you're asking about the 3d printed part alone, you could find some stuff on Amazon [1] for a reasonable price and hoist the smartphone with any old phone stand you might have lying around and a couple of rubber bands.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/wheel-layer-Chassis-Encoder-Arduino/d...

Intel-ISL (who built this) have lots of really interesting and useful AI/ML projects. It's worth looking at if you work in the field.

This looks fantastic! How soon before your github has the code in there? The STL files look great.

I don't know about github but the schematics and code for ours has been up on our wiki for years now.

https://robots-everywhere.com/re_wiki/

Robotics newbie here - does this work with the ROS software stack?

There is not much source code to judge this by, the android dir of the source repo https://github.com/intel-isl/OpenBot is currently empty.

But you can run ROS nodes on an android phone and maybe talk to the Arduino through a serial-to-USB port on the phone?

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