Face tracking robot

Android 4.0 introduced an API for face detection. It's really simple to use, you only have to set up a listener and it gets called each time a face is detected in the frame captured by the camera. I used it to make a Lego Mindstorms NXT robot that turns to look at you as you move around. Here's what it looks like:



The way it works is there's an application on the phone that checks if a face is detected. Then it communicates with the robot over Bluetooth and tells it to turn left or right, depending on the position of the face in the frame. Here's the application's source code if you want to take a look. I don't have building plans for the robot itself, but any robot with tank-like steering would work.

A cool way to demo this robot would be to use it for video chats or Google+ hangouts, but I don't think there's a way for two different applications to access the camera at the same time, so the face tracking functionality would have to be integrated into a video chat app. (Or I guess I could put a second phone on the robot.)