The selfie stick is dead! Scientists create two-legged robot that carries your phone and follows you around

The days of awkwardly trying to fit all of your friends into a photo could soon be over.

Scientists have unveiled a bizarre two-legged robot that carries your smartphone for you, trots along at your side and can even position itself to snap a picture.

The pint-sized gadget, dubbed 'PhoneBot', stands approximately 19 inches (48cm) tall and weighs about four pounds (1.8kg).

In initial demonstrations, the team showed the $400 (£302) robot can walk, track a person and stand up from a face-down position.

It can carry a smartphone that is mounted above the device’s ‘hips’, essentially forming its torso.

The phone’s camera allows the robot to detect and track people, while its motion sensors can gather information about the body’s movement and orientation.

While the robot was designed as a platform for research, it could also effectively act as a roaming photographer, automatically positioning itself to keep everyone in shot.

In a preprint posted to arXiv, the researchers said: ‘This paper presents PhoneBot, a low-cost, open-source compact humanoid platform that integrates a commodity smartphone with a modular body for sensing, on-board computation and interaction.’

The researchers, from the University of California, Los Angeles, explained that the phone runs the software controlling the robot’s movements.

It sends commands over Wi-Fi to a small onboard computer, which forwards them to the motors.

In total, PhoneBot has 13 motors – six in each leg and one that rotates its torso. This additional joint allows the camera to turn sideways while the robot’s feet remain planted.

The team tested their proposed system using a range of phones and found all supported the core sensing, movement control and vision functions.

While it currently has no arms, the scientists say they plan to add lightweight limbs for handling objects.

They also want to investigate how the robot copes on uneven surfaces, as it has only been tested on flat terrain so far.

The system can also respond to spoken commands using the smartphone's microphone and speaker.

At the moment, however, the speech recognition and language-processing functions are handled by a separate laptop.

The scientists hope to eventually run these AI models directly on the phone itself, reducing the need for external hardware.

Overall, the researchers believe smartphones provide 'a practical basis' for robotics because they already combine cameras, motion sensors, computing power and wireless connectivity in a single device.

They hope the low-cost platform will offer 'an affordable, reproducible platform for education, research and rapid prototyping' while making humanoid robots more accessible.