Computer vision based chess playing capabilities for the Baxter humanoid robot

This paper presents a project that allows the Baxter humanoid robot to play chess against human players autonomously. The complete solution uses three main subsystems: computer vision based on a single camera embedded in Baxter's arm to perceive the game state, an open-source chess engine to compute the next move, and a mechatronics subsystem with a 7-DOF arm to manipulate the pieces. Baxter can play chess successfully in unconstrained environments by dynamically responding to changes in the environment. This implementation demonstrates Baxter's capabilities of vision-based adaptive control and small-scale manipulation, which can be applicable to numerous applications, while also contributing to the computer vision chess analysis literature.