Walking iPhone Robot

Kazu Terasaki, a Japanese software engineer working in the Silicon Valley area, turned his iPhone into a robot. He showed it off for the first time at a BBQ party held here.

Kazu is a "moonlight inventor" and his inventions that have been commercialized in the past include ThumbType (a tiny keyboard that you can paste on your PDA) and Weird7 (a biped robot kit).

He was also involved in a product called PuchiRobo which is another robot kit that enables you to turn anything from a beer can to a tissue box into a walking robot. That technique is used in making his iPhone walk too. Right now you need a PC to move the robot, but in the future he'd like to come up with a chip too, so that you can just paste everything on your beer and it will come walking to you. The cute moving eye balls are also an application he created for the iPhone.

Kazu's expertise and motto is "to surprise people by creating new stuff using just ordinary technhology." His ideas and perspective have brought in a breath of fresh air to the robotics community in Japan where engineers generally want to use the most advanced and expensive techonologies.

Here is another video of the walking iPhone made by Kazu himself (although it's not quite my taste).

Comments

[RobotGrrl]

Why does it look like he's controlling it via a PC? :/
For all we know... it could just be an Arduino on the back of the iPhone, or something- not actually controlled by the iPhone. :(

[Norri]

Hi RobotGrrl! Thank you for your comment. Yes, he's controlling it via his PC now, as I mention in the article. But he'll be working on it so we have something to look forward to!