Haverford Soft Robotics Club creates "The Chess Bot"

There is an undefeated chess player at The Haverford School. Using fast and efficient analysis, opponents are kept on the ropes. 

It has a mechanical advantage, of course. Its creators, Sixth Former Finn Kelly and Fifth Formers Jack Ford and Matthew Cerniglia are still trying to sneak a win out on a robot they designed, engineered, and crafted. 

The group, which makes up part of the Soft Robotics Club, has spent years on the “Chess Bot,” refining their approach and using new technologies as they become available. Their engineering, robotics, math, coding, and chess skills merged to create an ingenious — and undefeated—tool. 

It started as a fun way to explore their engineering interests, but quickly turned into a cooperative effort to craft a robot ready to take on human competitors. 

As it faces those challengers, a mechanical gantry whirrs around the board, using an electromagnetic arm to pick up chess pieces fitted with magnets on their tops and bottoms. Beneath what looks like a normal chessboard, is a complicated system of magnets, wiring, and sensors that allow the robot to work properly. 

A human player moves a piece, and the sensors indicate the move. Using a library of custom chess moves created by Ford and an online chess engine, the robot examines the move and finds the best counter-move. When that move is determined, which takes all of a single second, the system uses the electromagnetic system to turn on a magnet; the arm glides its way over and down, before easily lifting the targeted piece and moving it to the side of the board. 

The Chess Bot, in its final form, took months of prototyping and programming, often with design tweaks and changes. One of the first iterations included an arm that looked more like a crane, but the students quickly realized the electromagnetic system weighed it down, causing it to tumble every time it picked up a piece. 

Their goal is to set it up for the entire community to take a crack at beating the bot. While the robot is a tough challenger, the designers are confident there is a chess player at Haverford who can beat it on it’s “easy” setting.