Mobile Coffee Table Uses Legs To Get Around

For getting around on most surfaces, it’s hard to beat the utility of the wheel. Versatile, inexpensive, and able to be made from a wide array of materials has led to this being a cornerstone technology for the past ten thousand years or so. But with that much history it can seem a little bit played out. To change up the locomotion game, you might want to consider using robotic legs instead. That’s what [Giliam] designed into this mobile coffee table which uses custom linkages to move its legs and get itself from place to place around the living room.

The process to build this mobile coffee table started years ago, when [Giliam] was designing walking mechanisms in software. A genetic algorithm was used to develop improved versions of various mechanisms, with the best ones going on to develop successive generations of the designs. Originally this just started out as a software project, but [Giliam] also developed some woodworking skills in the meantime which led to the actual construction of this coffee table.

From there the design was moved to Fusion 360, where it could then be sent to a CNC machine to create all of the parts for the 12-legged table. An Arduino Nano controls the leg movements, with power to the legs’ crankshafts provided by 24 V brushless motors. Finally, a Bluetooth module is included to allow the table to receive commands from a modified Nintendo Wii “Nunchuk” — itself an impressive project that we covered back in 2020.

This project took an incredible amount of work not just to design the leg mechanisms but CNC machine them out of bamboo, glue everything together, and finish it into what would be an excellent example of woodworking even without the capability of moving the table from the wall to the middle of the room and back as needed. We can’t really say we’ve seen a mobile coffee table before either, wheeled or otherwise, but if you need the tabletop instead to rotate and position itself at arbitrary angles we have seen one which was designed to be used for metalworking.

22 thoughts on “Mobile Coffee Table Uses Legs To Get Around

  1. Hmmm…

    Pretty awesome!

    What I just don’t get when I see builds like this though…
    I’m trying to imagine who the builder is…

    I know people who like to make things and would love to make something like this.

    I know people with uncluttered, minimalist spaces in their houses where such a device could successfully be operated.

    I don’t think I have EVER MET ANYONE who brings those two circles of the Venn diagram together.

    WHO ARE YOU?!?!?

    1. What you don’t see on these sort of projects is the ‘junk room’, ‘workshop’ etc – the ones nobody but the maker is even allowed to enter most likely… Plenty of folks will have that somewhat packed, ‘organized’ but likely chaotic looking to everyone else working space but still have to keep their ‘family’ room tidy, even if they don’t care personally – parents or significant others can be a drag, and if you have young children…

      So while I agree the Venn diagram doesn’t exactly have a huge overlap in my experience either, the person building these sort of projects might actually be exceptionally messy in every other room and still have the ‘zen’ ‘minimialist’ space where these things work for whatever reason.

        1. Looks better than mine right now (but my space, well spaces are in a more extreme degree of flux than normal – its serious re-organisation for more practical and easy use in the future time).

  2. So cool! Fun idea and very nice leg mechanism 👍

    I would be too scared to have it walk around with an open beer bottle tho, but with some sort of cup holders? hell yes.

    Thanks for sharing some details on your website, will go onto the pile of projects i should do some day

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