Smartphone Controlled Robot Platformfor Robot Soccer and Edutainment

This paper describes a low cost autonomous robot platform with an integrated smartphone. The robot is engineered to play robot soccer in the AMiREsot league as well as be used as an educational platform and for research purposes. The robot’s base board includes the electronics required for driving and controlling the motors, accessing the infrared sensors used for object detection and communicating with the smartphone via USB. The smartphone, which has a camera and several integrated sensors, serves as the brain of the robot. The design was focused around low cost and high performance via the integration with a smartphone. Preliminary tests of the platform include object detection and ball following using image processing techniques and the camera of the smartphone. Following testing, it has been concluded that this low cost robot platform with reduced hardware complexity is suitable for education, research and entertainment purposes.