Romo the smartphone-brained robot

Romo is a cute robot that is both affordable and easy to use, and could very well represent the future of domestic must-haves. The team behind Romo’s creation, Romotive, has utilized the iPhone to develop a robot that comes at a one percent cost of other models.

Romo could have some serious implications on the robotic landscape with its computeristic vision. According to Romotive CEO Keller Rinaudo, “Romo uses an iPhone as a brain and by building a robot that leverages smart devices we can actually build a computer-vision capable, Wi-Fi enabled robot. Typically this type of robot would cost between $10,000 and $50,000 – we can actually build that robot for $150.”

Download a free app on your iPhone and when you drop the screen to base, it turns into a robot face with little caterpillar-tracks to navigate the place. Romo will actually follow your face and even react to your actions. For instance, you can get it to sneeze when you rub its face.

“Romo uses computer vision to follow someone’s face, you can log into him from any iOS device anywhere in the world which means he is essentially a Telepresence robot. He can stream two-way audio and video and then, because the interface is so simple, it is very easy to create custom behaviours for the robot and share those with everybody else,” says Rinaudo.