Chess Playing Robot History and Safe ABB Cobots

Computers have beaten the best human chess players since 1997, but a chess playing robot still has a hard job: it has to see the board, pick up a small piece without knocking over its neighbours, and do all that a few centimetres from a human hand. This post goes from an 18th century fake automaton to Deep Blue, then to the robot arms and self-moving boards sold for homes this year. It also covers the 2022 tournament where a robot broke a child's finger, and what ABB's collaborative robots show about making a game robot safe to sit across from.

A chess robot arm faces a human player at the Women's World Chess Championship in Sochi, 2015. Photo: Sergei Kazantsev / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From a hidden chess master to Deep Blue

For most of chess history the only opponent was another person, across a table in a café, a club or a tournament hall. The first famous "chess machine" was a trick. In 1770 Wolfgang von Kempelen presented the Mechanical Turk at the Habsburg court in Vienna, a cabinet with a turbaned figure that moved pieces and beat many visitors. A strong human player sat hidden inside and worked the arm. The Turk toured Europe and America for decades before it was destroyed by fire in Philadelphia in 1854.

Arturo Pomar playing in a chess tournament at the Gran Kursaal in San Sebastián, 1950. Photo: Paco Marí, Kutxa Fototeka / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The first real chess automaton came from Spain. Around 1912 the engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo built El Ajedrecista, which played a king and rook endgame against a human king on its own. It sensed the human's move through electrical contacts under the board and moved its own pieces with an internal mechanism. It checkmated its opponent every time, though not in the fewest moves. Around 1920 his son Gonzalo built an improved version that moved the pieces with electromagnets under a standard board. Both machines still work and are on display at the Museo Torres Quevedo in Madrid.

El Ajedrecista, the chess automaton built by Leonardo Torres Quevedo. Photo: Olea / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Computing power then took over the thinking half of the problem. Home chess computers followed, and a few moved their own pieces: Milton Bradley's 1983 Grandmaster pushed magnetic pieces around with an arm hidden under the board. In May 1997 IBM's Deep Blue beat world champion Garry Kasparov in a six game match in New York. Deep Blue had no arm at all, and an IBM team member moved its pieces on the board. After 1997, building a chess robot meant solving the physical side: seeing the pieces and moving them safely.

One of the two racks of IBM's Deep Blue at the Computer History Museum. Photo: Anton Chiang / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Self-moving boards, robot arms and ABB at the table

Two kinds of home chess robot are on sale now. One hides the robot. GoChess Wizard Alive, a Harry Potter edition by Particula shown at IFA in Berlin in September, uses wheeled micro robots under a translucent surface to slide magnetic pieces into place. Yanko Design reported on 8 September that it costs $999 in a run of 1,000 boards, and that the first batch sold out in 48 hours. The other kind shows the arm. SenseTime's SenseRobot, launched in 2023, uses camera vision and a small desktop arm to pick and place real pieces.

Milton Bradley's 1983 Grandmaster robot chess computer, front, at the Computer History Museum. Photo: Marshall Astor / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Open arms bring a safety problem that hidden ones avoid. On 19 July 2022, at the Moscow Chess Open, a rented robot arm grabbed a 7-year-old boy's finger and broke it. He had moved a piece before the robot finished its own turn, and the arm closed on his finger instead of the piece. The Moscow Chess Federation blamed the boy for hurrying, but an engineer would draw a different lesson: a game robot has to expect a hand on the board at any moment. The boy played the next day with a cast.

Young players crowd around a chess robot at the 2015 Women's World Chess Championship in Sochi. Photo: Sergei Kazantsev / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not sell a chess robot, but its collaborative arms are built around exactly that expectation. YuMi, the IRB 14000 dual-arm robot, has padded arms and light payloads meant for small parts work next to people, and researchers have connected a YuMi to ROS to play chess with it. ABB has also used YuMi in public, from conducting an orchestra in Pisa to making coffee in a London shop. The GoFa CRB 15000 senses contact and stops, and can be taught by moving the arm by hand, as in no-code robot control.

ABB's YuMi conducts the Lucca Philharmonic with Andrea Bocelli in Pisa, 2017. Photo: ABB

Safer game robots for homes and classrooms

For homes, the likely winners are the quiet designs: boards that move pieces from below, or small arms with low force, slow motion near the human side of the board and a camera that waits until the hand has left. Chess is a good test because the rules are fixed and the pieces are light, so most of the difficulty is in perception and safety. The open questions are price, with the GoChess Harry Potter board at $999, and whether children keep playing once the novelty fades.

A man playing chess at the Jardins du Luxembourg in Paris. Photo: Jorge Royan / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

For classrooms and labs, a chess robot is a compact way to teach a whole robot cell: camera calibration, gripper design, motion planning and safety zones. A cobot like GoFa or a single-arm YuMi IRB 14050 can be used for that kind of project, with the board, the camera and the arm first laid out and tested in RobotStudio. ABB's SafeMove safety software can cut the arm's speed or stop it when a person enters a set zone, the kind of safeguard the Moscow case called for.

Two people looking closely at an ABB robot at work. Photo: ABB

For factories, chess itself is a demo, but the skills carry over. Picking a small object from a crowded grid while a person reaches into the same space is close to kitting, lab work and small parts assembly, where ABB's cobots already work. Expect more game robots at trade fairs and in schools, and more boards that hide the robot entirely. For anyone buying a home robot, how the arm behaves near a hand matters more than how well it plays.

ABB's YuMi making coffee at the Smartech bar in Selfridges, London. Photo: ABB

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