TidyBot++: An Open-Source Holonomic Mobile Manipulator for Robot Learning

Jimmy Wu, William Chong, Robert Holmberg, Aaditya Prasad, Yihuai Gao, Oussama Khatib, Shuran Song, Szymon Rusinkiewicz, Jeannette Bohg

Keywords: mobile manipulation, imitation learning, holonomic drive

TL;DR: We design an open-source holonomic mobile manipulator and show that it is capable of performing a variety of household mobile manipulation tasks in a real apartment home.

Abstract: Exploiting the promise of recent advances in imitation learning for mobile manipulation will require the collection of large numbers of human-guided demonstrations. This paper proposes an open-source design for an inexpensive, robust, and flexible mobile manipulator that can support arbitrary arms, enabling a wide range of real-world household mobile manipulation tasks. Crucially, our design uses powered casters to enable the mobile base to be fully holonomic, able to control all planar degrees of freedom independently and simultaneously. This feature makes the base more maneuverable and simplifies many mobile manipulation tasks, eliminating the kinematic constraints that create complex and time-consuming motions in nonholonomic bases. We equip our robot with an intuitive mobile phone teleoperation interface to enable easy data acquisition for imitation learning. In our experiments, we use this interface to collect data and show that the resulting learned policies can successfully perform a variety of common household mobile manipulation tasks.

Video: https://youtu.be/6MH7dhyIUdQ

Website: http://tidybot2.github.io

Code: https://github.com/jimmyyhwu/tidybot2

Student Paper: yes

Submission Number: 358