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

TL;DR

TidyBot++ is an open-source, holonomic mobile manipulator designed for household tasks, featuring a flexible arm and intuitive teleoperation, facilitating data collection for imitation learning in mobile manipulation.

Contribution

The paper introduces a cost-effective, fully holonomic mobile manipulator with a user-friendly teleoperation interface, enhancing data collection and task performance in household environments.

Findings

Successfully performed various household manipulation tasks

Demonstrated effective data collection via teleoperation interface

Showed improved maneuverability with holonomic base

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.