MAI created a chess-playing robot

MAI Department 307 "Digital Technologies and Information Systems" developed their own chess robot. Anton Sokolsky, assistant and engineer of the department, told about its capabilities.

PurposeFirst of all, it is a training robot. We wanted to create an open interface alternative to the expensive industrial special purpose robot handlers. Though generally a robot might be used for any purpose, our imagination led us to the creation of a chess player. The robot plays on an ordinary board with ordinary chess pieces against a human.What is the design of the robot?The chess robot has a manipulator and a control unit.The claw of the manipulator is able to move and approach objects from any direction due to six controlled axes of freedom.And the control unit is a set of microcontrollers and axes drivers. It interacts with the user via a user-friendly interface, because an open-source project is taken as the basis.How did it learn to play chess?The robot is equipped with a video camera, that “watches” the game. Video stream processing algorithms are able to recognize chess pieces and their position on the board. The Stockfish neural network is directly responsible for moves, and it rearranges the pieces using original algorithms.Has anyone won already?Since the robot is not a person, you can’t win against it by showing a fist under the table or distracting it with conversations. Although it does not play very well, it does not get distracted. So far, none of the developers managed to defeat our robot, but there is a legend that one late winter evening, the head of the department was able to defeat the robot.Does it know how to give in?We have implemented a flexible system for choosing the level of the complexity of the game: from 1 to 20.Can it teach me how to play?There are plans to finalize the voice interface module – and it will be possible to chat with the robot. We will also work over the “wrong moves” module so that the device would imitate the behavior of an ordinary human being. After that it will be interesting to learn to play chess with it.