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 servo drive (this Print All set uses the Feetech servo_wheel_hub; a Dynamixel-specific hub/mount set exists upstream if you use Dynamixel servos)
• 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.

Printed parts

~12 printed parts (sandwich base plate, 3× drive mounts + wheel hubs, Pi/Jetson cages, battery tray, camera mounts, SO-ARM100 base shim); see Print Files. Note: modified_base_arm is a replacement SO-ARM100 base shim that lets the arm sit flush on the base plate — required if you are mounting the arm on this base.

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

Printing

This Print All set is the Feetech build of the LeKiwi base — it maps to the root 3DPrintMeshes/ folder of the upstream SIGRobotics-UIUC/LeKiwi repo (the dynamixel_specific/, URDF/, and 5V/wired extras are intentionally excluded).

Print-multiples: drive_motor_mount and servo_wheel_hub each print x3 (three-wheel kiwi drive). Everything else is x1.

Compute mount — pick one: the Raspberry Pi case (pi_case_top + pi_case_bottom) is the default and matches the BOM. The jetson_holder is a mutually-exclusive alternative for a Jetson Orin build — print it instead of the Pi case, not in addition. (The list keeps both so either build is possible; you don’t print all three.)

Total for a standard Feetech + Pi build: 15 prints (9 single parts incl. the Pi case + 3× drive mount + 3× wheel hub; the Jetson holder is optional/alternative).