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Student Projects
Contact Information
University and Department: Beijing Information Science & Technology University, Department of Electronic Information Engineering
Team Members: Wu Rongfu, Zhang Haoyang, Zhang Xun
Faculty Advisors: Zhou Jinhe, Professor
Primary Email Address: zhoujinhe@bistu.edu.cn
Primary Telephone Number: 86-10-6488-4717
Project Information
Parts used to design and complete project:
NI Vision, NI Vision Assistant, NI LabVIEW
The challenge that the project is trying to solve:
Chinese Chess is one of the Chinese culture's oldest games, with a recorded history of over 1000 years. With the rapid development of computer science, human-computer games are becoming very popular. But most chess games can be only played on the computer instead of on a real chessboard. Our task is to design a real-time robot which can play Chinese Chess. The robot's arm can be used to handle the movement of the chessmen, making the human-computer game more interesting and user-friendly.
The challenge is meeting the time-critical requirements of this robot system. First, the image processing of the chessboard and chessman must be rapid, and no error can be allowed for the pattern match results. According to the different game levels, the runtime of chess algorithm should be different. For the intermediate level, the robot should finish the calculation of chessman's movement within five seconds. Finally, the motion control of the robot arm to move and fetch chessmen is also complicated.
How they addressed the challenge through their project:
The robot was developed using graphical programming environment NI LabVIEW which supports Intel Core Duo 2, with the integration of Matlab and C++ code. External hardware included a PCI-E extended card, a 1394 camera, MCU system, operation panels, and an optional network touch panel. The main framework of the system was built by LabVIEW.
The robot uses LabVIEW to initialize the program, to call chess algorithms DLL, to calculate the robot's move-step, to control the robot's movement, and to send command data to MCU system through the serial port. The command data is then checked by CRC16 to guarantee the reliability of communication. After the data is verified by the MCU, the MCU directs the robot arm to take corresponding action according to the command, using the pneumatic manipulator to grasp and move chessman. Lastly, the robot arm returns to the original point to wait for the next command.
Pictures:
Project video can be found at:
