You are invited to join us on the live demo on Teams for a robot chess playing demo.

Our senior design team SD07 (with Abhay Prasanna Rao, Umesh Sai Teja Poola, Neha Tirunagiri, and
Logan Becker) will present their robot chess player with a live game demo using the UR10e robotic manipulator at Robotic Education Lab (REL). Online guests are welcome to suggest moves (in an organized way).

Their work is the outcome of Project Joseph Hoane, a continuous effort from many undergraduate and graduate students at COM S joining the senior design and creative components efforts in the past two semesters. The project is named by Joseph Hoane, an IBM engineer who physically moved the chess pieces on behalf of Deep Blue during its matches against Garry Kasparov in 1996 and 1997. The match was a milestone in AI, showcasing cognitive intelligence in chess. However, with Joseph Hoane moving the pieces, it lacked the physical embodiment of intelligence, highlighting AI’s gap in real-world interaction. We challenged our students to fix this gap in this project. 

The first version of the project was offered in Spring 2025 with the best performed solution using customized chess pieces of uniform forms (of cubical shape) and an open-loop pick-and-place strategy. Team SD07 (along with one other team) were able to upgrade the system in this semester to work with real chess pieces.