VOICE controlled CHESS ROBOT

[Ben Yeh] wrote in to tell us about this voice-controlled chess robot he built together with three others as a final job for their Georgia tech ECE 4180 Embedded Systems style class.

To handle the speech recognition they grabbed an EasyVR board. This is a fine solution since it avoids the requirement for a computer to process voice commands (remember, it’s an embedded systems class). This idea breaks down when you discover out that the desktop computer next to the robot is where the chess game is running. perhaps that can be transferred to a microcontroller by the next set of 4180 students.

The robot arm part of the job is shown off well in the clip after the break. normally we’d expect to see stepper motors driving the axes of a CNC machine however in this situation they’re utilizing servo motors with built-in encoders. The encoders are i2c gadgets which feed information back to the primary controller. There was a parts ordering snafu as well as the z axis motor doesn’t have an encoder. No problem, they just added a distance sensor as well as a reflector to determine the up as well as down motion of the claw.