PhoneBot: a walking humanoid with a smartphone for a brain

Last updated: 21 October 2026.

In the news

Ruochen Hou, Quanyou Wang, Daniel Koh and Dennis W. Hong, of the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa) at UCLA, published PhoneBot on 6 October 2026: a small two-legged humanoid that uses an Android phone, mounted in its torso, as its eyes, balance sensor and computer.

What it is. PhoneBot stands 48.3 cm tall and weighs 1.8 kg with the phone. Its legs move on 13 low-cost actuators; the phone's camera, motion sensor, wireless and processor do the rest. The creators show it following a person by sight, talking with people, filming, and serving as a moving video-call screen, running on off-the-shelf consumer phones.

What it costs. “Approximately $400 excluding the phone”, the creators say.

What you may do with it. The project page puts the CAD files, the parts list and the assembly guide under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0): you may build it, change it and share it, but not sell it. The paper calls the hardware and software designs “fully open-source”; the software's license is not published yet.

Can I build it from Robotheca? Not yet. As of 21 October 2026 the files are not in a public repository (the project page's “Code” link is not active). Robotheca lists a robot once its files are public and their licenses can be read from the files; we will add PhoneBot then.

Robots like it you can build today: see The cheapest open-source humanoids to build, for example Open Duck Mini v2 (about 42 cm, “under $400” says its creator) or RoboPrime.

Sources: the paper, arXiv 2610.08737 (6 October 2026); the project page, phonebot.dev (read 21 October 2026).