Hi, I am currently considering a Lekiwi build but I am intrigued by Mars. Outside of the need for external compute, what issues did you find with SO101 and Kiwi?
Also I am curious about a couple of the parts, if you don't mind sharing - are those wheels the direct drive wheels from waveshare? And what is the RGBD camera? (Fwiw, even if it's hefty the MARS price tag seems fair to me).
There's several things but for example, there is no LiDAR on it nor even a good place to put one. If you're going to navigate around, without a LiDAR or good compute for VSLAM (which is very hard to setup and VERY demanding in compute), you will very quickly get lost. At this point the Kiwi is only for very local navigation (and you will still have IMU drift).
There is also a possibility for it to tip the base if the arm is fully extended. And the SO-101 has quite poor repeatability.
The base is also slow to move, and depending on which surface you are the omniwheels can get dirt in quickly.
Finally, external compute means you need in particular to teleoperate from your computer, so you have to be far from the robot and not necessarily in the same orientation than it which is very, very uncomfortable. This app system we made is one of the things people love the most about MARS.
Ah, and RGBD really does matter for navigation AND for learning (augmenting ACT with depth yields better results).
The wheels are indeed these ones, and the camera on the video is a luxonis oak-d wide, pretty expensive but comfortable to work with. However, the version we're shipping includes a much cheaper stereo-depth camera that we calibrate ourselves - I can't get you the reference right right now cause it's late at night but feel free to reach out on discord
Ah, so that's why the camera seemed familiar, I have a couple of the luxonis cameras around the office :). Re: kiwi, those are good points. Thank you for the answer!