FURG - NUMA - Chess Playing Robot - year 2001

This robot was developed in 2001 by undergraduate students at Applied Mathematics Lab (NUMA) at University of Rio Grande (FURG), Brazil.
Several people were involved in this project led by Professor Dr. Sebastião C. P. Gomes.
I developed all the electronics, FPGA hardware, mounted the RC servos in the position and write the C program for robot cinematics and control. It's me trying to play with the robot in this video ;-)
Luciano S. Silva was in charge of the computer vision and chess playing
Diego Gomes helped with communications and many other stuff.

Other people also played important roles in the developement of this robot.

Quick facts:
- The robot chess player is GNU chess program.
- Two computers were used: one for vision/game, other for control
- The computer's comunnication was through serial port
- The robot was built based on a previows SCARA precision robot project
- The SCARA two actuators were DC-motor based high-precision harmonic drives with incremental encoders and. The remaining actuators were RC servos
- The control signal was generated by a DOS based PC through parallel port (EPP mode)
- A FPGA based board was used to decode 2 incremental encoder data and to send torque to the SCARA actuators and PWM position command to the remaining RC servos.
- The camera was analog B&W and a DC-10 aquisition board was used for vision.
- We suffered from financial restrictions. This design was made using parts of two previows ones and the parts of this robot were used to build other robotics projects in the lab. :-(

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• SCARA
• chess
• robot
• DOS
• Linux
• GNUChess
• FPGA
• servo