Behold, a robot playing chess! This is my final project for MIT's course on robotic manipulation (taught by Russ Tedrake). While chess playing robots have been built before, almost all rely on custom chess boards, overhead camera systems, or many, many, cameras. My idea was to use a single, side-mounted, camera which would be inexpensive and easy to install. I then used Mask R-CNN and ICP to extract the complete board, Stockfish as the chess engine, and Differential Inverse Kinematics to plan the moves. I also used Drake simulator to simulate a Panda arm and the board.
Please see the Github for code and additional information.