An autonomous robot arm that you can play against | Hacker News Reader

An autonomous robot arm that you can play against

github.com

32 pointsTycho8711 comments

Cool project! Are there any safety measure so this won't happen: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/jul/24/chess-robot-gr...

I am not the creator but I am a robotics engineer. The robot in your link is an industrial robot with a lot of strength behind it. The robot in this project is comparatively lightweight, with thin 3D printed construction and very small motors with little to no gear reduction on the drive joints. Based on how this robot is constructed I would say it is incapable of breaking any bones on a human. In the business we call this "inherently safe", meaning it can't meaningfully hurt a person even if it malfunctions.

Put simply, the robot that hurt the child was a very strong industrial robot, this robot in contrast looks just strong enough to move chess pieces and not strong enough to hurt a person.

Smagin told RIA Novosti the incident was “a coincidence” and the robot was “absolutely safe”.

Different country, different politics, but the same idiotic platitudes.

I think I want something less obvious. Put an X-Y mechanism under the board and move the pieces with magnets or somesuch. Some kind of RFID reader or perhaps an optical system similar to a mouse under each square could get rid of the over head camera...

You can't trivially move pieces with magnets, what about ones that are surrounded?

It also just feels cooler to have a robot arm do it.

That's easy enogh: just put a room-temperature superconductor on the bottom of the pieces so they can start levitating!

Yeah, you would have to either 1) move those pieces away temporarily or 2) make the squares larger (or pieces narrower).

These exist. https://miko.ai/products/miko-chess-grand

There you go — I thought I had seen something like that before. Open-hardware it. (Although their price does not seem unreasonable.)

https://youtu.be/AQLOj-TylGg

We used a robot arm to move pieces because we thought that would look the coolest. Although I agree that the over head camera isn't the prettiest solution. We thought about using RFID but we were afraid that the thickness of the board could be an issue and the RFID sensor I have found cost a lot if we are going to use 1 for each square.

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