View Proposal

---

Proposer

Ioannis Konstas

Title

Build a 3D-printed low-cost mobile manipulator

Goal

To 3D print and build a fully operational low-cost mobile robot with a 6 DOF manipulator!

Description

Who said robots have to be super expensive? Let's build LeKiwi [1] a fully open-source mobile robot with a 6 DoF manipulator on top of it! It won't be able to pick up very heavy things, but it can be the perfect assistant for picking up building LEGO blocks for your next project (if you are patient to wait for it to finish... :D ) We can provide you with access to the 3D printer and purchase all materials, so you will only have to spend the time assembling it. From then on the topic is left quite open-ended as we are open to suggestions: you can do a more HRI topic experimenting with interacting with humans for collaborative tasks while teleoperating it, or go full-on and train it to perform "pick-and-place" tasks autonomously using models such as ACT [2], or π0 [5], based on modern Python frameworks such as lerobot by Huggingface [3], to more complicated instruction following using Gemini + π0 [6]. Finally, if you are up for it, you can also experiment with training with its simulated digital twin, first existing in MuJoCo [4] and then deploying it to the real robot. [1] https://github.com/SIGRobotics-UIUC/LeKiwi?tab=readme-ov-file [2] https://tonyzhaozh.github.io/aloha/ [3] https://github.com/huggingface/lerobot [4] https://mujoco.org/ [5] https://www.physicalintelligence.company/blog/pi0

Resources

Background

Url

Difficulty Level

Moderate

Ethical Approval

InterfaceOnly

Number Of Students

-3

Supervisor

Ioannis Konstas

Keywords

robots, 3d printing, hri, manipulation, action execution, nlp

Degrees

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence
Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence with SMI
Master of Science in Computing (2 Years)
Master of Science in Data Science
Master of Science in Human Robot Interaction
Master of Science in Robotics
Master of Science in Robotics with Industrial Application