Chess Playing Robot : Robotic arm capable of playing chess

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this thesis was to create a robot that through the use of visual recognition and robotics could play chess.The idea for this project came from the fact that there is an increasing demand for smart robots that can make their own decisions in a changing environment, and the fact that chess has recently seen a surge of new players. The optimal design of the arm making the moves was decided to be of SCARA type, which is a common robotic arm that excels in pick-and-place operations. The movement of the arm was driven by two stepper motors connected to a Raspberry Pi and an external power supply. Movement in the Z-direction was achieved through the use of a servo motor driving a gear rack vertically. A camera was placed above the chessboard, and through the use of numerous programs and functions, images were converted to chess notation which was then sent to a chess engine running on the Raspberry Pi. The visual recognition worked optimally when the chessboard was well and evenly lit. When lighting was poor, values that defined colors could be changed, allowing for proper evaluation of the colors, however when the illuminance dropped below 15 lux the blue pieces became indistinguishable from the black squares and therefore the visual recognition stopped working.