LeKiwi

01A university robotics club's answer to "now make it move"

LeKiwi began inside SIGRobotics-UIUC, a student robotics organization at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, whose GitHub repository for the project dates to February 2025 — a few months after Hugging Face and TheRobotStudio's SO-100 arm had made 3D-printed robot arms a hobbyist-budget proposition, but while that arm could still only work within reach of wherever it was bolted down. The team's answer was a wheeled base sized to carry the arm and its own onboard compute, reusing the same Feetech STS3215 bus servos already driving the arm to drive the base's wheels too — one part family, one firmware stack, one supply chain.

LeKiwi's own documentation explains where the second half of the name comes from directly: the base is a three-wheel "Kiwi drive," the term roboticists use for a three-omni-wheel holonomic configuration that can move in any direction without turning first. Contributors credited in the project's README span both disciplines — CAD design by Manav Chandaka, Bhargav Chandaka, and Pepijn Kooijmans; software by Pepijn Kooijmans, Gloria Wang, Bhargav Chandaka, and Advait Patel. A week after the team's own announcement, Hugging Face's LeRobot lead, Rémi Cadène, amplified the project on X:

02Design: one arm, three wheels, one Raspberry Pi

LeKiwi is deliberately built from parts LeRobot users are already likely to have or source: an SO-100 or SO-101 arm, the same one documented for stationary use, mounted on a 3D-printed turntable above the three-wheel omnidirectional base. The base's three 4-inch omni wheels are driven by the same Feetech STS3215 servos as the arm — the arm's six servos keep motor IDs 1 through 6, and the three wheel servos take IDs 7, 8, and 9, all on one shared motor-control board and serial bus.

Onboard compute is a Raspberry Pi 5 in the reference build, documented as swappable for "any PC that can run on 5V and has enough USB ports." It runs Hugging Face's `lerobot` package and streams camera and joint-position data to a laptop over the network. Two USB RGB cameras cover the workspace and the gripper's own point of view, and builders choose one of three power setups depending on how much lifting torque and mobility range they need.

All of the base's structural parts are 3D-printed in PLA — the project's own guide documents roughly 34 hours of total print time across the base plates, wheel hubs, camera mounts, and Raspberry Pi case — and its assembly guide estimates about two hours to put the printed parts and electronics together. Code and mechanical design are both released under the Apache License 2.0, the same license SO-101 uses.

• Same servo family throughout: the arm's six Feetech STS3215 servos keep motor IDs 1–6, and the base's three wheel servos take IDs 7, 8, and 9, all on one shared motor-control board and serial bus
• Onboard compute is a Raspberry Pi 5 in the reference build, documented as swappable for "any PC that can run on 5V and has enough USB ports"
• Two USB RGB cameras — one covering the workspace, one mounted at the wrist — stream to a laptop over the network alongside joint-position data
• Three power options: a 12V lithium battery for more lifting torque, a 5V USB-C power bank for an easier first build, or a wired, battery-free version that trades mobility range for the lowest price
• Runs Raspberry Pi OS or Ubuntu on the Pi, connected over SSH from a laptop running the same `lerobot` Python package documented for SO-101 — no separate firmware or OS image specific to LeKiwi

03What it costs: $184 to $499, plus a growing list of kit vendors

The project's own bill of materials prices five build variants, with 3D-printing filament costed separately in every case. Three "base only" variants exclude the arm entirely: a battery-free wired build runs $184, a 5V power bank pushes that to $248, and a 12V battery to $251.50. Two "full robot" variants add a complete SO-101 teleoperation arm pair to the base, costing $499 with the 5V setup or $482 with the 12V one.

A small number of vendors now sell LeKiwi as a component kit rather than a from-scratch, part-by-part build — though assembling it is still up to the buyer either way. ROBOTIS, the Korean servo maker behind the Dynamixel motors used in LeKiwi's alternate hardware variant, sells a "LeKiwi Bundle" of official hardware components for $530.44, crediting SIGRobotics-UIUC as the original designer; a 3D printer is still needed for the structural parts, or buyers can pay $50 extra for ROBOTIS to print them. Seeed Studio's "LeKiwi Full Kit" goes a step further, bundling pre-printed 3D parts and a battery alongside the electronics.

04Software: a supported robot type, not a bolt-on hack

LeKiwi isn't a community patch bolted onto LeRobot from outside — it's documented as one of the library's own supported robot types. Running `pip install -e ".[lekiwi]"` on both the Raspberry Pi and a laptop pulls in the Feetech SDK and the ZeroMQ networking the split compute setup needs; from there, the same calibration and data-recording CLI tools LeRobot uses for SO-101 — `lerobot-find-port`, `lerobot-setup-motors`, `lerobot-calibrate` — work for LeKiwi by passing `--robot.type=lekiwi`.

Driving the base itself uses a dedicated keyboard scheme layered on top of arm teleoperation: W/A/S/D drives forward, left, back, and right; Z and X turn in place; and R/F step through three preset speeds.

Community builders have taken the design in a few directions since. Foxglove, a robotics-visualization company, documented adding LiDAR-based mapping to a LeKiwi base in February 2026. In June 2026, a researcher publishing on Hugging Face's community blog documented training a vision-language-action policy (SmolVLA) on a LeKiwi paired with Pollen Robotics' PincOpen gripper for mobile pick-and-place tasks, arguing that "a vast amount of impactful physical-world tasks are mobile ... you need to move to the task, rather than it coming to you." As of this writing, LeKiwi has no numbered successor and remains LeRobot's primary reference mobile base — its role in the lineup is to answer "how do I make my arm mobile," the same way SO-101 answers "how do I get a cheap arm at all."

05Timeline at a glance

06FAQ

07Sources