Teaching the Baxter robot to play chess

Build a model leveraging computer vision and machine learning techniques to teach a robot chess.

View code on GitHub

Baxter

Baxter is a two-arm robot used by University of Glasgow students for various robotics and MSc projects. It is mostly used for autonomous perception and manipulation of fabrics.

Playing chess

I used Python to write several scripts to teach Baxter:

• What a chessboard and its pieces look like
• The basic rules of chess
• How to pick and place a specified chess piece

All my scripts heavily utilised ROS¹ and its node signaling capabilities. Ultimately, Baxter was able to play a game of chess against himself, albeit a very slow and tedious game.