Look what my smartphone can do

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Smartphones Ideal as low-cost brains for robots

At the University of Pennsylvania’s Vijay Kumar Lab., Dr. Kumar and his students have been developing advanced, autonomous drones assembled from off-the-shelf parts. The only thing the flying robot, a quadrotor,  has in terms of electronics is a motor, a controller and a battery. All of the clever stuff is being handled entirely by the phone.

This is a good example of just how far smart phones have come: they’re certainly powerful computers, but it’s the integrated sensing that comes standard in almost all of them that makes them ideal for low-cost brains for robots. Smart phones now come complete with things like gyros, accelerometers, inertial measurement units – IMUs, and high resolution cameras.

What’s unique about this Penn. University project, according to IEEE Spectrum, is that it is the first time a sophisticated platform like this – and vision-based real-time autonomous navigation of a flying robot is pretty sophisticated – is controlled by a very basic consumer device. The phone itself is an ordinary Samsung Galaxy phone, although Kumar’s team have installed a special app they’ve developed in cooperation with Qualcomm. The app makes use of the phone’s built-in cameras and other sensors to determine its own flight path. Images from the camera can be analyzed at a very rapid pace — around 200 times every second — and this information is converted into control signals that are pushed to the drone’s four motors.

According to The Geek, what’s amazing here isn’t so much that a quad-core Quallcom chip is powerful enough to function as the brain of a flying drone. Plenty of drones run on chips that are no more powerful than what you’d find on a cheap mother board. Dr. Kumar says this is the first time that a consumer device has been used to bring this level of self-control to a drone.