I've been working on this since March as a fun hobby project to learn more about robotics. This is a video of it playing one of it's very first full games!
Some features:
▪ Fully autonomous with no user input other than moving the pieces by hand.
▪ All running on an NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX and ESP32 chip so it's portable and can be battery powered.
▪ Perception via a single 1080p camera and deep learning computer vision models trained on synthetic data generated in Unity, which can generalise to any reasonable chess set placed anywhere within reach.
▪ Coded from scratch (no ROS) with high level control in python plus inference, kinematics/planning & microcontroller code in c++.
▪ Robot body designed in fusion360 (design inspired by @HowToMechatronics) and 3d printed.
▪ Still a work in progress and after some polish I hope to take it to some chess meet-ups!
