An open hardware, open firmware, open data wheeled-base humanoid reference design — sibling morphology to the bipedal Free Humanoid Platform and the deployment partner of the shoal water-remediation fleet. Targeted at the shoal dock-B service mission: urban stormwater outfalls, harbor docks, and industrial discharge points where shoal docks are deployed. Shielded by the Free Humanoid Corpus.
Status: scaffold (v0.1). This repository establishes the project’s positioning, governance, and architectural commitments. It is not yet a buildable robot. The architectural decisions are resolved in ARCHITECTURE.md §9; each commitment is shielded by a corpus-cited prior-art chain. Detailed CAD, vendor-pinned BOM, and physical-build documentation are the next deliverables.
Free Humanoid Wheeled is the wheeled sibling to the Free Humanoid Platform. It inherits the platform’s torso, arms, hands, head, sensing, compute, and safety supervisor architecture verbatim. It replaces the bipedal legs with a wheeled differential-drive base for paved and concrete urban service environments. The design domain is intentionally narrower than the bipedal sibling — no stair climbing, no rough-terrain ambition — and the resulting mass, payload, and runtime budgets are correspondingly more generous.
The project sits at the intersection of four projects:
OpenLoco — the substrate. The platform compiles from a single UDD JSON file to URDF, MJCF, STL, BOM, and assembly through OpenLoco. Free Humanoid Wheeled is a humanoid_wheeled morphology family in the same compiler.
Free Humanoid Corpus — the prior-art commons. Every non-trivial design choice cites a specific corpus entry, the same governance posture as the bipedal platform.
Free Humanoid Platform — the bipedal sibling. The upper body of this morphology is the upper body of the platform; this repo cross-links rather than duplicates that work.
shoal — the deployment partner. Free Humanoid Wheeled is designed to integrate with the shoal cartridge-swap protocol and waste-handling logistics at shoal dock-B sites. See shoal ARCHITECTURE §3 for the dock spec, especially shoal-dock-B (shore-tethered).
These are tenants of one another. The wheeled morphology is one of many possible service-environment tenants of the bipedal upper body and one of many possible service tenants of the shoal fleet.
Paved and concrete urban service environments. Stormwater outfalls. Harbor docks. Industrial discharge sites. Wastewater treatment plant grounds. Municipal water-utility yards.
The platform deliberately does not target stair climbing, off-road traversal, or unstructured outdoor terrain. Where stairs are required, the bipedal sibling is the correct platform. Where terrain is rough but flat (gravel, dirt access roads), the wheeled-balancing variant suggested by ascento shielding remains a future-track option.
| Quantity | Target | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Total system mass | ~70 kg | 30 kg base (battery + drive + casters + tower stand) + 40 kg upper body (inherited from the bipedal platform’s 50 kg minus its leg mass) |
| Battery capacity | 2 kWh primary + 0.2 kWh UPS | Doubled from the bipedal’s 1 kWh; no leg cavity constraint |
| Sustained payload at extended reach | 30 kg | Six times the bipedal’s 5 kg; possible because the wide wheeled base gives a much larger support polygon and the lower-mounted battery lowers the COM |
| Peak ground speed | ~1.5 m/s | Half-again the bipedal’s 1.0 m/s; safe upper bound for service-environment shared-space operation |
| Base footprint | ~600 mm × 800 mm × 350 mm tall | Wide stance for stability under upper-body manipulation loads; clears standard 800 mm doorways |
| Drive wheels | 2× 15” diameter pneumatic | Sized for outdoor curb tolerance at dock-B sites |
| Caster wheels | 2× passive swivel | Positioned for differential-drive geometry; specifics flagged TBD in ARCHITECTURE §2.2 |
These numbers are scaffold targets, not validated specifications. Iterating them against physical CAD, the actuator-distribution architectural call, and the shoal dock-B protocol is the Phase 1 deliverable.
The platform exists to handle the human-equivalent service tasks at shoal dock-B sites:
shoal-fleet.The deployment unit is the platform plus a transport vehicle that moves it between dock-B sites; the platform itself is not road-going.
Same as the bipedal sibling, with the same release-blocker note on canonical license-text inlining:
| Artifact class | License | Files |
|---|---|---|
| Hardware (CAD, schematics, PCB layouts, mechanical designs) | CERN-OHL-S 2.0 | LICENSE-HARDWARE |
| Firmware, control software, simulation, tools | Apache 2.0 | LICENSE-SOFTWARE |
| Documentation | CC-BY-SA 4.0 | LICENSE-DOCS |
| Descriptors (UDD JSON), datasets, BOM data | CC0 1.0 | LICENSE-DATA |
CC0 on the descriptor is the load-bearing license choice. The license files in this repo currently contain SPDX-tagged headers; inlining the canonical text is a release-blocker before any public push.
Inherits verbatim from Free Humanoid Platform: defensive-publication norms, examiner-citeable design rationale, no-patent-aggression contributor norm, reference-design-not-product, fail-safe-to-inert. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full text of the contributor contract.
Per the OpenIE hosting split, OSS projects live at openie-dev.github.io/<project>/. The wheeled morphology’s eventual home:
github.com/openIE-dev/free-humanoid-wheeledopenie-dev.github.io/free-humanoid-wheeled/Local-only at v0.1; no public push until the canonical license text inlining and the architectural-call resolution gates pass.
free-humanoid-wheeled/
README.md this file
ARCHITECTURE.md canonical full-system spec, prior-art-cited
CONTRIBUTING.md quality bar, defensive-publication norms
LICENSE-HARDWARE CERN-OHL-S 2.0 (canonical text inlining is a release blocker)
LICENSE-SOFTWARE Apache-2.0
LICENSE-DOCS CC-BY-SA-4.0
LICENSE-DATA CC0-1.0
descriptor/ UDD descriptor — source of truth
free-humanoid-wheeled.udd.json
README.md
base/ wheeled-base subsystem (the morphology-distinguishing work)
README.md
upper-body/ inherited from free-humanoid-platform
README.md
electronics/ PCB pointers, power tree, Joule SOM integration
firmware/ HAL, behaviors, MathGround safety supervisor, comms
control/ differential-drive MPC, manipulation policy
sim/ MuJoCo / Gazebo / Drake model pointers
docs/ design notes beyond root README/ARCHITECTURE
prior-art/
INDEX.md corpus entries this morphology depends on, by subsystem
Each subdirectory has its own README.md scoped to its concern.
Current state is scaffold (v0.1). The morphology’s shape, governance, architectural commitments, and prior-art chain are in place. Phase 1 is OpenLoco-compiler-buildable simulation (descriptor → MuJoCo → differential-drive controller → dock approach). Phase 2 is dock-side prototype. Phase 3 is the first municipal-utility pilot at a real shoal dock-B site. See ARCHITECTURE.md §6 for the full roadmap.