LeKiwi
An SO-101 arm on a three-wheel omnidirectional base, making the cheapest open-source mobile manipulator for LeRobot. You drive it with a keyboard and a leader arm to record demonstrations, then train policies on the data. It is a learning platform, top speed 0.4 m/s, not a finished home helper.
- Price
- $482Shipped Full build about $482 (12V) or $499 (5V) in US parts per the project BOM, including the SO-101 arm and Raspberry Pi 5. Seeed sells the base-only kit for $179 without arm, Pi or cameras.
- Status
- ShippingShipped Open-source design published February 2025; DIY and assembled kits sold by several vendors
- Height
- —
- Weight
- —
- Payload
- —
- Runtime
- —
- Top speed
- 0.4 m/s
- Degrees of freedom
- —
- Compute
- Raspberry Pi 5 (streams to a laptop for policy inference)
- Made in
- United States
A dash means the maker has not published it. Values with a label are claims, not measurements.
Trust and legalWhat these mean
Does a remote human drive it?
Yes, remote operators
Teleoperated by leader arm plus keyboard for data collection; learned policies can run autonomously on simple tasks.
US FCC
Not applicable
A self-assembled open-source build with no whole-robot FCC authorization; radios are in off-the-shelf modules (Raspberry Pi). The FCC rule's treatment of hobbyist kits is not addressed; weight not published, so the 4.4 lb threshold is unverified.
Status history2 dated events
- Shipping
Several companies now sell assembled and DIY LeKiwi kits Upgrading the LeKiwi into a LiDAR-equipped explorer (Foxglove)
- Shipping
SIGRobotics at UIUC publishes the open-source LeKiwi design (Apache 2.0) with BOM and build guide LeKiwi - Low-Cost Mobile Manipulator (GitHub)
PromisesLedger
Sources for specs and status
- LeKiwi repository (SIGRobotics-UIUC)27 Sep 2026
- LeKiwi bill of materials27 Sep 2026
- LeKiwi docs (Hugging Face LeRobot)27 Sep 2026
- LeKiwi Kit (12V) mobile base (Seeed Studio)27 Sep 2026
Last updated 27 Sep 2026. Spotted an error? Send a correction.