We've heard the argument that tablets make great robot heads. The have tons of components that robots require: a microphone, a camera, and a touchscreen for input, and speakers and an LCD for output. There's also a processor and app platform that can power the interface. Google's Project Tango—basically an Xbox Kinect shrunk down into a smartphone—can take things a step further. It has enough sensors that it can also handle vision and navigation.

As the IEEE reports, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have strapped Project Tango to a quadcopter and created an autonomous drone. Most automated quadcopter systems use external cameras and require the entire room to be outfitted with special markers. They also use a laptop to do the number crunching. The Project Tango quadcopter is special because it is entirely self-contained. The computer vision sensors on Tango collect enough data for autonomous navigation to be possible and the on-board processors can handle all the trajectory planning. The leader of the project, Professor Vijay Kumar, described Project Tango as being able to let you "literally velcro it to a robot and have it be autonomous."

Project Tango as a robotics platform shouldn't be a surprise. The device is frequently compared to an Xbox Kinect, a device that revolutionized robotics when it was released ( the two projects share several engineers, as well). Even robots that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, like Willow Garage's PR2, can be improved simply by giving it a $150 Kinect hat. In an interview with CNET a mechanical engineering student working with the PR2 said the Kinect "costs $150 and replaces $7,000 in sensors." Project Tango brings that technology to an even more robot-ready platform thanks to being a smaller, self-contained device with a faster processor and an on-board battery.

The researchers are still working on testing the accuracy of Tango, but initial results put its accuracy to within one centimeter. Numbers like that in such a compact package have the potential to revolutionize robotics (again). Even if this version of Tango doesn't prove that accurate, another potential boon Tango offers over the Kinect will be the update cycle. While consoles (and their accessories) only get upgraded every 5-8 years, smartphones are usually on a yearly update cycle. Even if Tango isn't updated that often, roboticists will finally have a 3D sensing device that isn't tied to a gaming console release cycle.