Math & Kinematics

Base Frame

A base frame is the coordinate frame fixed to a robot's base link, serving as the root reference in which forward kinematics expresses end-effector poses and in which workspace targets are commonly specified. Frame conventions and transforms between base, world, camera, and tool frames are managed explicitly in software, for example via the tf2 library in ROS, and errors in these transforms are a classic source of systematic positioning bias.

Why it matters for physical AI

Learned policies trained with observations or actions in one frame silently fail when deployed with mismatched frame conventions, making rigorous frame bookkeeping a mundane but critical part of policy portability.