The stage platform that taught a home robot to move neatly
Backstage at a theatre, I’m shoving a heavy platform with a tall prop into a tight corner. The wheels only go forwards, backwards, and turn, so it’s all wide swings and little nudges. Then someone rolls in a base that can slide sideways and spin on the spot. Suddenly we’re guiding, not wrestling.
That same awkward shuffle shows up in cheap home robots. They move like a basic trolley, so in a hallway or by a counter they keep doing extra turns. If the robot is trying to reach with an arm while keeping a camera view steady, those turns make everything slower and harder to repeat.
A newer robot base, called TidyBot++, tries to bring that backstage glide into a price people can actually pay. It’s built from widely available competition parts, plus a couple of simple custom bits. Parts can be swapped fast, and different arms and sensors can bolt on without rebuilding the whole thing.
The neat trick is in the wheels. Each wheel can steer and drive, but it’s mounted slightly off its turning point, like a caster that naturally falls in line. With each wheel pushing just right, the base can go left, right, forwards, backwards, or spin in place. Takeaway: move any direction, and the job gets simpler to repeat.
To show it chores, they drive it with an ordinary mobile phone. As the person moves the phone, the robot mirrors that motion using the phone’s camera and motion sensors. The robot also tracks how far it rolls and turns, so it can come back to the same spots in a real home.
With those recorded runs, it could do things like open a fridge, wipe a counter, take out rubbish, load laundry, and water a plant. The clearest test was wiping a counter: forced to move like a basic trolley, it wandered and failed more. Allowed to slide sideways, it moved straight in, kept its view steadier, and worked far more often.