An Open-Source Robotic Chinese Chess Player

Consumer robots can accompany children growing up, improving their abilities while playing and entertaining. This paper presents an open-source, practical, low-cost robotic Chinese chess player. The proposed system includes an elaborate mechanical structure, a simple kinematic solution, a novel robot operating system, real-time and accurate chess recognition. Regarding its mechanical design, it combines a magnetism structure and mechanical cam drive, while the overall system has just three servo motors. At the same time, its control strategy is simple and effective. Furthermore, a lightweight robot message communication mechanism, entitled TinyROS, is developed for computing resource-limited embedded chips. Concerning the recognition process, our CNNbased object detector determines chess and achieves accurate identification. As a result, our robotic Chinese chess player is exquisite and easy for large-scale promotion while improving users' chess skills. Aiming to facilitate future consumer robot research and popularize customer robots, the model's mechanical and software design and the TinyROS protocol are open-sourced at https://github.com/Star-Robot/chinese-chess-robot.