Where’s my self-balancing iPhone?

I love those self-balancing robots with two side-by-side wheels — the ones that operate on the same inverted pendulum principle as Kazuo Yamafuji’s “parallel bicycle” (and its much-later imitator, the Segway). A few years ago I talked about these little gizmos here.

Given the fact that there are now well over 100,000 iPhone apps and counting, I’m trying to figure out why nobody has yet built a little attachment that will turn your iPhone into a self-balancing robot. The iPhone would be an ideal platform for this. It’s cute, it’s ubiquitous, it’s got a camera so it can figure out where it is, and it’s got a graphic screen so you can give your little self-balancing robot an expressive face.

All you’d need to do is build a little attachment with two wheels, each connected to a geared motor and some auxiliary power control electronics. All of the smarts needed for navigation and self-balancing are right there in the iPhone’s own CPU.

Once iPhones go self-mobile, you and your friends can set them up in the same room so they can wheel around in packs for game play and other real-world activities.

This seems like such an obvious play for a toy company. I’d certainly buy one, if they didn’t cost too much. And of course it would provide a great platform for educational programming.

A number of groups have constructed little self-balancing side-by-side wheel robots, but these devices are mainly one-offs, built from the ground up in order to perform the single trick of getting around while staying upright. If you started with an iPhone it seems to me you’d be getting a lot more bang for your buck.

So where is my self-balancing iPhone? Are we going to be able to get one of these soon? Or am I going to have to wait until after they come out with that flying car?

Come to think of it, and not to take anything away from Apple, it might be poetic justice if such a thing appeared first on Google’s Android.