LeKiwi Mobile Base

LeKiwi — Mobile Base for SO-ARM100

LeKiwi is a three-wheeled omnidirectional mobile base designed to carry the SO-ARM100 (or its sibling Koch arm) around a real environment. Add a 5-DOF teleop arm on top, put a camera on the base and the wrist, and you have a low-cost mobile manipulation platform compatible with the entire LeRobot stack.

Why "kiwi"?

Kiwi drive — three omniwheels at 120° — gives you true holonomic motion: the base can translate in any direction and rotate independently, no slewing required. That's huge for teleop demos where a human operator is driving with a joystick and expects the base to move "like a spaceship," not like a car.

What you get

• Three-wheel kiwi drive with omniwheels on custom-printed hubs
• Feetech or Dynamixel servo variants (pick your servo ecosystem — both hubs are included)
• Raspberry Pi + optional Jetson Orin compute cage printed onto the base plate
• Battery compartment sized for standard 3S/4S LiPo packs
• Servo-controller mount and base-mounted webcam holder
• Mounting pattern on the top plate that drops directly into an SO-ARM100 base

What you do with it

• Mobile teleoperation: leader arm drives the follower arm, joystick drives the base. Stream both from a laptop anywhere on the network.
• Mobile imitation learning: extend LeRobot's episode recorder to include base velocities. The existing Diffusion Policy and ACT models have been adapted by the community to condition on base state.
• Multi-camera observation: base camera sees the environment, wrist camera sees the task. Both go into the policy.
• Classroom mobile robotics: cheap, printable, and works with commodity servos.

Parts

~12 canonical printed parts on the base:

• base_plate_layer1 / base_plate_layer2 — sandwich plate structure
• drive_motor_mount — servo bracket, ×3 at 120°
• servo_wheel_hub — attaches the omniwheel to the servo horn, ×3
• battery_mount — LiPo tray
• pi_case_top / pi_case_bottom — Raspberry Pi 5 enclosure
• jetson_holder — optional Jetson Orin bracket
• servo_controller_mount — Dynamixel U2D2 / Waveshare bus driver holder
• base_camera_mount, wrist_camera_mount — webcam rigs
• modified_base_arm — replacement SO-ARM100 base shim that lets the arm sit flush on the base plate

Attribution & license

• Designer: SIGRobotics-UIUC (Student Interest Group on Robotics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
• Upstream: https://github.com/SIGRobotics-UIUC/LeKiwi
• License: Apache 2.0
• Ecosystem: LeRobot

Links

• Upstream repo: https://github.com/SIGRobotics-UIUC/LeKiwi
• SO-ARM100 (arm to mount on top): https://github.com/TheRobotStudio/SO-ARM100
• LeRobot stack: https://github.com/huggingface/lerobot

Build Guide

Step-by-step assembly guide: github.com/SIGRobotics-UIUC/LeKiwi/blob/main/Assembly.md