Humanoid robot uses your iPhone as its brain, saving $1,000 on an extra chip
chris_j_paxton · x · 2026-08-18
A humanoid home robot is built to be powered by your iPhone: over a billion people carry a pocket supercomputer whose processing power goes mostly unused, so the team harnesses it instead—saving about $1,000 on an extra chip.
They argue early home robots won't need to run 24/7 (like robot vacuums) and full autonomy is still far off, so human supervision nearby will be part of the process; reusing existing hardware also makes for a cleaner, eco-friendly design. Robotics researcher Chris Paxton noted phones increasingly run small LLMs, making them a plausible robot brain, echoing the philosophy behind robot utility models.
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