There has been some attempt to use the G1 as a remote control for a robot. See here http://code.google.com/p/srv1console/

While this is a nice start, it occurs to me that the idea could be taken much farther as the G1 (and other soon to follow android based cells) sports an application processor, storage, camera, etc. It seems to me that one could use a cheap microcontroller for PWM motor control and things like that, but use the phone's appication processor for more of the heavy lifting artificial intelligence kinds of things. I would think that the easiest way to connect the microcontroller with the cell would be blue tooth, as the miniUSB would require tinkering with the kernel and that's probably not an option for most people.

Anyway, I've done a little digging and I found this library for video processing http://code.google.com/p/jjil/ and a website by Oleg in Russia who has gone pretty far with J2ME http://www.robohobby.com/. I realize that java is too slow for anything really processor intensive (the jjil library might speeds things up a bit) but the application processor on the phone has to be way better than most of the micro controllers out there.

What do you guys think? Would it be possible to build anything like serious robot functionality (stereo vision, spacial mapping) this way, or am I wasting my time?

Just a little bump. Its Friday night here and I have no life. LOL

Real-time computer vision on Android doesn't seem feasible at the moment (given the current available devices). You'd probably be better off with a cheap Atom-based system and OpenCV or something similar if you want fast and easy prototyping.

Yes, I am worried about speed if I try to do any kind of computer vision on the G1. I do think that the raw processing power of the phone itself might OK for simple computer vision. You can get plenty of information from, say, a 80x60 image, and that is not too bad to work on. What bothers me is that java bytecode is slow, and more specifically Android's version of java. I have heard that google's JVM has been optimized for memory management, not computing speed.

This is really a shame, since I think Android would be a great platform for hobby robots. Just make the code open source and post for free in the market place and it would take off if it did work. The phone could act as the robot's brain for people who have built their own robots. Just attach the phone to the robot and set it free.

Ohhhh well :-<