July 2010 AAAI Robot Chess

Last week, we took second place at the AAAI robot chess competition! This was a fantastic event where different kinds of robots played chess against each other. The major point was not so much to play good chess, but rather to move the pieces effectively and handle complications like piece displacements, captures, castles and various forms of uncertainty.

Our team, led by Hyun-Soo Yi fought hard with Golem Chesster (Schunk LWA3 and SDH hand). Intel took first place with a custom robot arm and depth sensor. CMU brought Chiara, a hexapod robot with an arm and on-board vision. Alabama had a simple and effective design of a small mobile robot with a servo-based arm.

Photos of the event from Jiuguang Wang

The movie below shows the competition for second place between Golem Chesster (Georgia Tech) and Chiara (CMU).