Exploring the Capabilities of a General-Purpose Robotic Arm in Chess Gameplay

As the field of human-robot collaboration continues to grow and autonomous general-purpose service robots become more prevalent, robots need to obtain situational awareness and handle tasks with a limited field-of-view and workspace. This paper addresses these challenges using the game of chess as a testbed with a general-purpose robotic arm. To achieve successful robotic manipulation in playing board games like chess, the robot must follow game rules and prioritize human safety, all while operating in a limited workspace with field-of-view constraints. The proposed solution uses a 6-DOF general-purpose robotic arm with a parallel gripper attached to a tea table. A pipeline is proposed that considers the rules of the chess game, the constraints of the robot, and environmental conditions to generate valid moves and countermoves. To validate the algorithm, experiments were conducted with the robotic platform, and the parameters of the system were tuned. The proposed algorithm achieved competitive performance, with an average robot turn success rate of 91.94%. This research demonstrates the potential of a general-purpose robot with a single camera to engage safely in competitive tasks with humans, even with these constraints.