A step towards a robotic system with smartphone working as its brain: An assistive technology

This paper describes a novel smartphone based navigation application. The smartphone based robotic system is sensitive to both the tactile and head-movement input commands from a user. Here we present our design used for developing a prototype of the robotic system as a proof-of-concept of an assistive technology that could facilitate partially disabled people to navigate effectively. Additionally we designed a usability study where our prototype was validated by seven healthy participants. Such an intelligent robotic system controlled by a smartphone can find a variety of applications based on navigation systems for disabled persons, educational tools especially for children with autism, surveillance and social telepresence. The hardware prototype could then be further used for development purposes to build a variety of applications using Application Program Interfaces (APIs) that can program the robot to do a custom task. © 2013 IEEE.