Mobile Base (Chassis)

The wheeled lower half of a robot that carries the upper body around.

A mobile base is the part of a robot responsible for locomotion; it typically integrates drive wheels and motors, a battery, a lidar or camera, an IMU (inertial measurement unit), and a motion controller, exposing a simple “give it a velocity and it moves” interface (in ROS, usually a cmd_vel velocity command). Bases are commonly classified by wheel layout: differential-drive bases (two wheels turning at different speeds to steer, mechanically simple), Mecanum-wheel or omnidirectional bases (can move sideways), swerve-drive bases (each wheel steers independently, good for heavy loads), and Ackermann bases (front-wheel steering, like a car). Mounting a robot arm or a humanoid upper body onto a mobile base turns it into a composite robot or a wheeled humanoid; the base's navigation accuracy and battery life directly affect how well mobile manipulation works.

ExampleMobile ALOHA mounts the ALOHA dual-arm teleoperation system on a mobile base, letting the robot move around a home while doing two-handed tasks like stir-frying or opening cabinets.

Also called

AGV Base, Mobile Platform

Related

Differential Drive Base · Mecanum Wheel · Swerve Drive · Mobile Manipulator · Wheeled Humanoid Robot · Mobile Manipulation

Sources

Mobile ALOHA 项目主页 (Chinese)
Mecanum wheel - Wikipedia