Baxter Plays Chess

Описание: A demonstration video of one of our research projects, where we made the Baxter Robot from Rethink Robotics (http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/baxter/) play chess. A secondary goal was to allow the robot to play in unstructured environments, with uncontrolled lighting conditions and no additional markers.

There are three main subsystems:
Computer Vision, powered by OpenCV (http://opencv.org/)
Chess Engine, powered by Stockfish (https://stockfishchess.org/)
Mechatronics, powered by IKFast (http://openrave.org/docs/0.8.0/openra...)

Baxter is able to play against a human user or itself, and allows the user to select a difficulty level. The computer vision algorithm detects the board (and allows for some variability in orientation) and position of the pieces in order to determine the move that was last made. The chess engine uses this information to decide what the next move should be. Baxter then calculates a set of waypoints that allow it to execute that move.

This application was developed in Python, along with ROS, OpenCV, Pystockfish (https://github.com/iamjarret/pystockf..., and Chessnut (https://github.com/cgearhart/Chessnut).