Hardware

Mobile Base

A mobile base is the wheeled or tracked chassis that provides a robot's locomotion, integrating drive motors, battery, drive electronics, and typically the navigation sensors such as LiDAR, cameras, and an IMU. Common drive geometries include differential drive, omnidirectional configurations using Mecanum or swerve modules, and car-like Ackermann steering, each trading maneuverability, floor requirements, payload, and odometry quality differently.

Why it matters for physical AI

Base kinematics constrain everything above them: holonomic bases simplify whole-body planning for mobile manipulation, while battery capacity and payload determine how much sensing and compute a deployment can carry.