Author: Steven Edwards
Date: 16:45:13 10/23/04
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On October 23, 2004 at 19:01:45, Ismenio Sousa wrote: >Would you be willing to re-consider developing your robotic arm chess if we were >to take a pool, or some kind of pledge, to see how many people here would be >interested in buying it from you? Any idea about the cost? First, I'd have to re-work the 10+ year old design because of the changes in the availability of off-the-shelf components. Nowadays there's a much better selection of servomotors, gear trains, grippers, and other robotic parts. These haven't gone done much in price, but rather have improved in quality. Another change would be selection of a camera; there's been many gains in this area as well. I'd also consider mounting the camera on the hand instead of having a separate pan/zoom facility. An alternative would to sacrifice size and positional generality and go without a camera; this would save on the cost and the software/processing requirements. There are some under US$500 hobbyist arms available, but I don't see any that are suitable for playing with tounament sized equipment. I could be wrong on this; maybe others could post references to the contrary. Until I could determine a reasonably certain list of parts and suppliers, I'd be hesitent to quote a price. I note with some trepidation that Excalibur has recently tossed a bit of cash at this problem and with an unsuccessful result. Furthermore, their effort was for a small, fixed location board with pieces that were likely less than 10% of the mass of a tournament set. So, it would take a non-trivial effort to be sure.
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