TruckBot: Android Brains Make Robot Truck
When most people think about using an Android Phone for some type of “remote” car/truck/robot project they think of using the phone as a remote control to operate another piece of hardware. But not Tim Heath and Ryan Hickman – they wanted the Android Phone to be the actual brain of their bot-child:
This means they could utilize every hardware and software component of an Android phone, programming the bot to avoid obstacles, recognize faces and voices, pinpoint its location and go places. An Arduino board, which basically serves as a software-hardware link, is not smart enough to handle that, but an Android phone can.
A lot of hard work and only $30 later and the duo had created a DIY Truckbot – perhaps not all-powerful in its current form but the potential it REPRESENTS is quite significant. They have directions on how to build it yourself but I’m most eager to see where they take their experiment next. For lots more fun details hit the via link.
[Via Wired]