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 approach is robust across different smartphones and robot
bodies. A video of our work is available at
this https URL