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.’
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