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
Proceedings of The 8th Conference on Robot Learning, PMLR 270:3729-3741, 2025.

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.

Cite this Paper

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v270-wu25a, title = {TidyBot++: An Open-Source Holonomic Mobile Manipulator for Robot Learning}, author = {Wu, Jimmy and Chong, William and Holmberg, Robert and Prasad, Aaditya and Gao, Yihuai and Khatib, Oussama and Song, Shuran and Rusinkiewicz, Szymon and Bohg, Jeannette}, booktitle = {Proceedings of The 8th Conference on Robot Learning}, pages = {3729--3741}, year = {2025}, editor = {Agrawal, Pulkit and Kroemer, Oliver and Burgard, Wolfram}, volume = {270}, series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research}, month = {06--09 Nov}, publisher = {PMLR}, pdf = {https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mlresearch/v270/main/assets/wu25a/wu25a.pdf}, url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v270/wu25a.html}, 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.} }
Endnote
%0 Conference Paper %T TidyBot++: An Open-Source Holonomic Mobile Manipulator for Robot Learning %A Jimmy Wu %A William Chong %A Robert Holmberg %A Aaditya Prasad %A Yihuai Gao %A Oussama Khatib %A Shuran Song %A Szymon Rusinkiewicz %A Jeannette Bohg %B Proceedings of The 8th Conference on Robot Learning %C Proceedings of Machine Learning Research %D 2025 %E Pulkit Agrawal %E Oliver Kroemer %E Wolfram Burgard %F pmlr-v270-wu25a %I PMLR %P 3729--3741 %U https://proceedings.mlr.press/v270/wu25a.html %V 270 %X 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.
APA
Wu, J., Chong, W., Holmberg, R., Prasad, A., Gao, Y., Khatib, O., Song, S., Rusinkiewicz, S. & Bohg, J.. (2025). TidyBot++: An Open-Source Holonomic Mobile Manipulator for Robot Learning. Proceedings of The 8th Conference on Robot Learning, in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 270:3729-3741 Available from https://proceedings.mlr.press/v270/wu25a.html.

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