Chess Brain and Autonomous Chess Playing Robotic System

In this paper, a 4 degree-of-freedom (DOF) chess playing robotic manipulator and computer vision based chess recognition system are presented. The robotic system is capable of playing chess game autonomously against human or another robotic system. The logical system consists of anti-glare camera mounted on the chessboard, which acts as an eye of robot, personal computer for run-time implementation of computer vision algorithm, an open-source chess engine used as chess brain of robotic manipulator, which plays chess algorithmic ally on behalf of robot, and of course robot itself. On development side, a simple image segmentation based computer vision algorithm was developed to find the legitimate chess move and human hand motion detection, a software system was developed that enables the robot to pick and drop chess pieces from prescribed chess boxes, lastly communication channel was exploited for interfacing computer vision algorithm with chess engine. The whole robotic system is formulated from recycled machine parts and open source tools. The convincing performance of computer vision algorithm and robotic manipulator testifies by its 1st position in IEEE Final Year Project Competition Lahore 2012.