An Open-Source Reproducible Chess Robot for Human-Robot Interaction Research

Renchi Zhang Joost de Winter ^* Dimitra Dodou Harleigh Seyffert Yke Bauke Eisma

• Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands

Recent advancements in AI have accelerated the evolution of versatile robot designs. Chess provides a standardized environment for evaluating the impact of robot behavior on human behavior. This article presents an open-source chess robot for human-robot interaction (HRI) research, specifically focusing on verbal and non-verbal interactions. The OpenChessRobot recognizes chess pieces using computer vision, executes moves, and interacts with the human player through voice and robotic gestures. We detail the software design, provide quantitative evaluations of the efficacy of the robot, and offer a guide for its reproducibility. An online survey examining people's views of the robot in three possible scenarios was conducted with 597 participants. The robot received the highest ratings in the robotics education and the chess coach scenarios, while the home entertainment scenario received the lowest scores. The code is accessible on GitHub: https://github.com/renchizhhhh/OpenChessRobot design of a chess-playing robot to be used for studying HRI. HRI research may benefit from a chessbased setup because the game of chess provides a controlled, rule-based environment in which the impact of robots on human players can be precisely measured. HRI-oriented studies with chess robots have typically used them to imitate human behaviors and assess their resulting impact on the human opponent. Pereira et al. (2008) and Leite et al. (2013) used the social robot iCat to play chess with children. This robot relies on an electronic chessboard as input and emits emotional responses and verbal utterances, guided by an emotion model. Sajó et al. (2011) developed Turk-2, a multimodal chess robot with human-like communication skills, while LC et al. ( 2021) explored human-robot and robot-robot-human interaction using artistic intervention, where expressive robot arms played chess and embodied distinct personalities.When an electronic chessboard is not used, a camera is needed to determine if a move has been made and, if so, which move it was. A common solution is a monocular top-view camera, which has the advantage of not experiencing perspective-induced occlusion, making it relatively easy to identify any changes in the chess position (