We built a robot that plays chess! The mechanical system is a coreXY gantry mounted under a waterjetted carbon fiber board. There is an electromagnet on the gantry that turns on and off to move the chess pieces, which have magnets embedded in their base. Similar chess robots have been built before, but they are all extremely bulky and/or slow. A small footprint was one of our essential design constraints; the gantry fits vertically within the 30mm T-slot extrusions that make up the system’s frame. Our parts, which were 3D-printed with 100% infill in carbon fiber, were designed with tolerances <2mm.
Technologies: CAD (Onshape), manufacturing (waterjet, 3D printing, electronics), Python/Arduino
Date: Nov. 2022 - Mar. 2023
Collaborators: Keiji Imai (Lead), Eric Zhou, Claudius Tewari
Funding: MIT ProjX and and MIT Morningside Academy of Design
MIT News Article: https://design.mit.edu/news/mags-the-chess-playing-robot