Old Phones Are Becoming Robots?!?

24 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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1:04

In this solo commentary, Matt Wolfe showcases PhoneBot, a project from Dennis Hong’s UCLA robotics lab that uses an inexpensive smartphone as the robot’s brain. The phone provides vision, motion sensing, and runs the AI that enables walking, which was first trained in simulation before being deployed on the device. Early prototypes walked with a limp, but the current version can self‑right when laid flat and navigate a living‑room environment, following and filming a person. The hardware cost is dramatically lower than conventional research humanoids—phones cost $50‑$80 and the robot body about $400 versus $3,500‑$14,000 for comparable platforms. All design files and parts lists are open‑sourced, inviting hobbyists to repurpose old phones into robots.

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This is the coolest thing I saw today. Somebody turned a cheap old smartphone into the brain of a walking robot. It's called PhoneBot, and it comes out of Dennis Hong's robotics lab at UCLA. The phone isn't a remote. The phone is the robot. Its camera is the eyes, its motion sensors handles the balance, and the AI that makes it walk runs right on the phone. They trained that AI in a simulation first, and the early versions literally walked with a limp. Then they loaded it onto a real phone, and well, here it is, walking around a living room. But here's the best part: lay it flat on its face and it just gets back up all by itself. The phones they use, they cost like $50 to $80. Now the body is about $400, but similar research humanoids cost anywhere from $3,500 all the way up to $14,000. And they're open sourcing all of it— the parts list, the 3D print files, everything. Now it's tiny and it has no arms yet, but it can already follow you around and film you. So I'm curious, do you have any old phones lying around that you might want to turn into a robot? Matt!