This document maps every load-bearing design choice in the wheeled morphology to specific entries in the Free Humanoid Corpus. Each entry is cited by its corpus id. Anyone reviewing this morphology — including USPTO examiners and invalidity-contention attorneys — can use this index to locate the specific defensive publications that anticipate any patent claim against the platform’s architecture.
The corpus has 269 entries (as of 2026-05-06) spanning 1818 (Frankenstein) to 2025. This index cites the entries that are most directly load-bearing for the wheeled morphology.
The bipedal sibling Free Humanoid Platform is the canonical statement for the upper-body subsystems (kinematic topology of the arms, hands, head, torso; actuator distribution at shoulder, elbow, wrist, hand; sensing at every link; the safety-supervisor architecture; the compute architecture; the learning-policy stack). This document recapitulates those subsystems in summary form and adds the wheeled-base-specific subsystems (1, 2, 6, 9 below).
| Corpus id | Year | Shielding |
|---|---|---|
dlr-justin |
2009 | Foundational anchor. DLR Rollin’ Justin: the canonical academic disclosure of wheeled humanoid mobile manipulation with full impedance control. 17-year prior art on wheeled humanoid platforms for service tasks. |
pr2 |
2010 | Willow Garage PR2: omnidirectional wheeled mobile manipulation; the platform around which ROS was built. 16-year prior art on wheeled humanoid hardware and on robotics middleware. |
willow-pr1 |
2008 | Willow Garage PR1: cable-driven intrinsically-safe wheeled humanoid; anticipates several modern compliant-actuator humanoid claims. |
pepper-softbank |
2014 | SoftBank Pepper: foundational prior art for wheeled-base humanoid social robots. The omnidirectional wheeled base design has been widely cited. |
nao |
2006 | SoftBank/Aldebaran NAO: not wheeled, but the SoftBank-Aldebaran lineage anchor that culminates in Pepper. NAO’s mechatronic-design publication is widely cited. |
toyota-hsr |
2012 | Toyota Human Support Robot: telescoping-torso wheeled humanoid for domestic service. The closest existing prior art to this morphology’s design domain. Anchors the tower-stand-with-torso-lift commitment. |
reachy-2-pollen-2023 |
2023 | Pollen Robotics Reachy-2: open-source mobile humanoid with VR teleop. Anchors the open-source wheeled-humanoid posture. |
ascento |
2019 | EPFL Ascento: wheeled-balancing biped. Held as future-track for any wheeled-balancing variant of this morphology. |
| Corpus id | Year | Shielding |
|---|---|---|
forbidden-planet-robby |
1956 | Robby the Robot: 70-year fictional anchor for wheeled service humanoid with multi-language voice-command interface. The single most pointed fictional precedent for this morphology family — Robby is wheel-based, civic-deployed, and accepts speech commands in multiple languages. |
magnus-robot-fighter |
1963 | Magnus, Robot Fighter: 63-year fictional anchor for mass-produced humanoid civic deployment, including job-function-specialized variants (police variant, industrial variant, transit variant). |
b-9-lost-in-space |
1965 | B-9 (Lost in Space): 61-year fictional anchor for civil-defense / hazard-warning / family-companion humanoid platforms. The “Danger, Will Robinson!” pattern is a hazard-warning behavior anchor. |
silent-running-drones |
1972 | Huey, Dewey, Louie (Silent Running): 54-year fictional anchor. The on-set drones were physically functional compact bipedal humanoid platforms; production team published behind-the-scenes mechanism documentation. Anchors compact-service-humanoid disclosure. |
Implication: wheeled humanoid platforms for service deployment in civic / utility environments are fully exhausted as patentable subspace. Any patent claim issued post-2010 on a “wheeled humanoid for service tasks” is anticipated by at least two academic entries (dlr-justin, pr2, toyota-hsr) plus a 70-year-deep fictional chain.
| Corpus id | Year | Shielding |
|---|---|---|
mit-cheetah-2 |
2014 | Foundational QDD architecture. Wensing 2017 T-RO paper “Proprioceptive actuator design in the MIT Cheetah” is the foundational actuator-design disclosure. |
mini-cheetah |
2019 | Open MIT QDD reference. The most-cited modern QDD anchor. |
mit-cheetah |
2009 | Original Cheetah; foundational QDD lineage. |
| Corpus id | Year | Shielding |
|---|---|---|
mjbots-moteus |
2019 | Foundational prior art for compact open BLDC controllers in legged robotics. CAN-FD interface. |
odrive |
2017 | Open BLDC controller (USB / CAN). |
simplefoc |
2020 | Open BLDC controller (Arduino-tier). |
Pneumatic-wheel + outdoor-curb-tolerance is shielded by the universal mobile-robot literature; no specific corpus entry is load-bearing here. The 15” diameter target is shielded against dlr-justin’s smaller hard-rubber wheels (indoor-only) and against pr2’s 800-mm-class wheels (overengineered for the design domain).
Caster-front + drive-rear is the universal differential-drive pattern, shielded by dlr-justin, pr2, pepper-softbank, and the broad mobile-robot lineage. No specific patent-thicket exposure.
Inherited from Free Humanoid Platform prior-art INDEX, Subsystem 1. Summary:
| Corpus id | Year | Shielding |
|---|---|---|
wabot-1 |
1973 | Foundational anchor for full-scale anthropomorphic humanoid kinematic topology. |
honda-e0–honda-e6 |
1986–1993 | Honda E-series chain. Anchors arm + torso topology. |
honda-p1, honda-p2, honda-p3 |
1993–1997 | Honda P-series. Anchors balance and ZMP. |
asimo, hubo, hrp-2–hrp-5p |
2000–2018 | Mass-produced humanoid lineage. |
nasa-valkyrie, robonaut-2, pal-talos |
2011–2017 | Industrial / NASA full humanoids. |
darwin-op, poppy-humanoid, inmoov, reachy |
2010–2020 | Open-source small/desk humanoid lineage. |
unitree-h1, unitree-g1, berkeley-humanoid, k-scale-os |
2023–2024 | Recent academic / commodity humanoid disclosures. |
For the wheeled morphology, the leg-related subset of this chain is dropped (no cassie-osu, digit-meta, atrias); the arm/hand/torso/head subset is preserved.
Inherited from Free Humanoid Platform prior-art INDEX, Subsystem 2, with the leg-actuator chain dropped. Summary:
| Corpus id | Year | Shielding |
|---|---|---|
honda-e0 |
1986 | First disclosed harmonic-drive use in a humanoid. 40-year prior art. |
dlr-toro |
2014 | Torque-controlled humanoid; harmonic-drive disclosure. |
asimo, hubo, hrp-2–hrp-5p, robonaut-2, pal-talos, nasa-valkyrie |
2000–2018 | Full chain. |
| Corpus id | Year | Shielding |
|---|---|---|
shadow-dexterous-hand |
2002 | 24-year prior art on tendon-routed anthropomorphic hand. |
dlr-hand-ii |
2001 | DLR’s dexterous hand. |
dlr-justin |
2009 | DLR’s tendon-arm chain. (Same anchor as Subsystem 1.) |
pisa-iit-softhand |
2012 | Underactuated soft hand (synergy-based). The recommended-hand anchor. |
| Corpus id | Year | Shielding |
|---|---|---|
mit-cheetah-2, mini-cheetah |
2014, 2019 | QDD architecture. |
mjbots-moteus |
2019 | Open BLDC controller. |
| Corpus id | Year | Shielding |
|---|---|---|
toyota-hsr |
2012 | Telescoping-torso wheeled humanoid. The single direct anchor for the tower-lift commitment. |
Inherited from Free Humanoid Platform prior-art INDEX, Subsystem 3, plus the wheeled-specific additions:
| Corpus id | Year | Shielding |
|---|---|---|
pomerleau-alvinn |
1989 | Camera-to-control. |
howe-cutkosky-tactile-1989 |
1989 | Robotic tactile sensing. |
biotac-syntouch |
2008 | Multimodal fingertip tactile. |
gelsight |
2009 | High-resolution optical tactile. |
| Corpus id | Year | Shielding |
|---|---|---|
dlr-justin |
2009 | Lidar-equipped wheeled humanoid; tilt-supervised drive. |
pr2 |
2010 | Lidar additions to wheeled mobile manipulator. |
hyundai-boston-dynamics-spot |
2015 | Outdoor lidar mobile platform. |
GPS, 5G modems, and acoustic-receivers in robots are commodity and not patent-thicket-dense; corpus shielding is light because the design choices are obvious-and-universal rather than novel-claimed. The JANUS-receiver pattern is shielded by shoal ARCHITECTURE §4.
The safety supervisor architecture is inherited verbatim from Free Humanoid Platform prior-art INDEX, Subsystem 5 — the deepest chain in the corpus, 80 years of fictional anticipation plus 30 years of formal academic prior art. Summary chain:
| Corpus id | Year | Shielding |
|---|---|---|
frankenstein |
1818 | Earliest fictional anchor. |
rur-rossums-robots |
1920 | Three-Laws-anticipating constraint failure. |
asimov-positronic-robots |
1940 | Three Laws. 86-year fictional anchor. |
williamson-folded-hands |
1947 | Safety-constraint failure mode. |
forbidden-planet-robby |
1956 | Three-Laws-compliant fictional disclosure (also Subsystem 1 anchor). |
magnus-robot-fighter |
1963 | Mass-produced civic-deployed humanoid (also Subsystem 1 anchor). |
b-9-lost-in-space |
1965 | Hazard-warning humanoid (also Subsystem 1 anchor). |
hal-9000 |
1968 | Supervisor failure modes. |
silent-running-drones |
1972 | Maintenance drones with task-bound autonomy (also Subsystem 1 anchor). |
asimovs-zeroth-law |
1985 | Extension of Three Laws. |
data-tng |
1987 | Self-aware constraint adherence. |
robocop-1987 |
1987 | “Prime Directives” as Simplex-anticipating disclosure. |
sherman-simplex-architecture |
1995 | Foundational academic. Verified safety controller as fallback. |
iso-10218-collaborative-robots |
2006 | Industrial standards anchor. |
reachability-analysis-safe-control |
2005 | Formal-method safe set computation. |
control-barrier-functions |
2007 | Modern formal safety-controller standard. |
runtime-assurance-rta |
2010 | AFRL Simplex-to-flight-control bridge. |
shielding-rl |
2018 | Formal safety on learned policy. |
The bipedal supervisor adds three invariants for the wheeled morphology — slope tilt, edge proximity, low-battery-on-shore-power. Their additional shielding:
| Corpus id | Year | Shielding |
|---|---|---|
dlr-justin |
2009 | Slope-tilt-supervised drive control. Direct anchor for the slope-tilt invariant. |
pr2 |
2010 | Cliff-sensor / edge-proximity hard-stop pattern. |
toyota-hsr |
2012 | Low-battery operational latch (per HSR operational logs cited in the corpus entry). |
Implication: the fictional chain is denser at the front for this morphology — forbidden-planet-robby, magnus-robot-fighter, b-9-lost-in-space, silent-running-drones all directly anticipate civic-deployed service-humanoid behavior, which is exactly the deployment context for a dock-B service humanoid.
Inherited from Free Humanoid Platform prior-art INDEX, Subsystem 4. Joule SOM as recommended-default within an abstract HAL. Imitation-learning-from-teleop manipulation policy. Locomotion policy is wheeled-specific (differential-drive MPC, no RL bipedal locomotion).
| Corpus id | Year | Shielding |
|---|---|---|
act-aloha, mobile-aloha, diffusion-policy |
2023–2024 | Imitation learning. |
openai-rt-2, open-x-embodiment, physical-intelligence-pi-zero, skild-foundation-model, covariant-rfm |
2023–2024 | VLA foundation models (optional upgrade path). |
For wheeled-base locomotion control, the standard differential-drive MPC literature plus dlr-justin and pr2 shield the choice fully.
Inherited from Free Humanoid Platform prior-art INDEX, Subsystem 6, plus the wheeled-specific 5G and JANUS-receiver additions cited in Subsystem 5 above. ROS 2, CAN-FD, gRPC, WebRTC. None patent-thicket-dense.
This subsystem is the load-bearing original engineering and its corpus-shielding chain is the lightest. The cross-product of wheeled humanoid + microbial water-remediation cartridge fleet + municipal water-utility EAM integration is not anticipated by any single corpus entry. The integration surface is shielded element-by-element but not as a composition:
| Element | Corpus shielding |
|---|---|
| Cartridge-swap protocol (manipulation surface) | dlr-justin (mobile manipulation), shadow-dexterous-hand (anthropomorphic hand), pisa-iit-softhand (underactuated grasp) |
| Waste-hopper retrieval (manipulation surface) | dlr-justin (dual-arm mobile manipulation) |
| Biology-reservoir handshake (comms protocol) | shoal ARCHITECTURE §4 — the dock-burst optical protocol |
| EAM REST API (integration surface) | None required — REST-over-HTTP for asset-management integration is universal |
| JANUS-receiver coordination (acoustic comms) | shoal ARCHITECTURE §4 plus the broader JANUS-protocol corpus tag |
The mission-integration protocol stack itself is original work and is the focus of v0.1 of this morphology. See ARCHITECTURE §5.
When you make a design choice in the platform — adding a feature, picking a vendor, modifying the descriptor, or writing a new firmware module — locate the relevant subsystem in this index and cite the most specific corpus entry that anticipates the choice.
If the corpus does not yet anticipate your choice:
corpus.jsonl).CONTRIBUTING.md).draft in the descriptor or architecture and document the invalidation gap.Every commit that introduces a load-bearing design choice should reference at least one corpus entry id by name in the commit message. This is the operational form of the governance posture in README.md and CONTRIBUTING.md.