PiChess : Voice Controlled Robotic Chess Player

Abstract: The purpose of this bachelor’s thesis was to create a robot that could play chess through voice recognition and robotics. The two areas to be investigated were the robot’s precision and speed. The reason for building a robot arm of the SCARA type was that it can easily pick up and place pieces with reach over the entire chessboard. The robot arm is controlled from a Raspberry Pi 4 and is moved by two Dynamixel AX-12a servomotors. To pick up chess pieces, a continuous 360-degree servomotor was used to lift an electromagnet which was mounted on a gear rack. AUSB microphone was used to collect what move the player indicated. The Stockfish chess engine was used to generate moves for the robot. The parts of the robot that had the greatest impacton precision were the stability of the aluminum profiles, the gear ratio between the gears that transmit torque to the arm, the gear mesh contact ratio and the size of the electromagnet. The time it took to complete a move could be reduced by increasing the speed of the motors whena chess piece was not attached to the electromagnet, andusing a larger gear in the RC servo that raises and lowers the electromagnet.