Look what my smartphone can do

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.

Fuente e imagen:  i-hls.com