Development of a Chinese Chess Robotic System for the Elderly Using Convolutional Neural Networks

According to the data from Alzheimer’s Disease International (ADI) in 2018, it is estimated that 10 million new dementia patients will be added worldwide, and the global dementia population is estimated to be 50 million. Due to a decline in the birth rate and the development and great progress of medical technology, the proportion of elderly people has risen annually in Taiwan. In fact, Taiwan has become one of the fastest-growing aged countries in the world. Consequently, problems related to aging societies will emerge. Dementia is one of most prevailing aging-related diseases, with a great influence on daily life and a great economic burden. Dementia is not a single disease, but a combination of symptoms. There is currently no medicine that can cure dementia. Finding preventive measures for dementia has become a public concern. Older people should actively increase brain-protective factors and reduce risk factors in their lives to reduce the risk of dementia and even prevent the occurrence of dementia. Studies have shown that engaging in mental or creative activities that stimulate brain function has a relative risk reduction of nearly 50%. Elderly people should develop the habit of life-long learning to strengthen effective neural bonds between brain cells and preserve brain cognitive functions. Playing chess is one of the suggested activities. This paper aimed to develop a Chinese robotic chess system for the elderly. It mainly uses a camera to capture the contour of the Chinese chessman, recognizes the character and location of the chessman, and then transmits this information to the robotic arm, which will grab and place the chessman in the appropriate position on the chessboard. The camera image is transmitted to MATLAB for image recognition. The character of the chessman is recognized by convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Forward and inverse kinematics are used to manipulate the robotic arm. Even if the chessmen are arbitrarily placed, the experiment showed that their coordinates can be found through the camera as long as they are located within the working scope of the camera and the robotic arm. For black chessmen, no matter how many degrees they are rotated, they can be recognized correctly, while the red ones can be recognized 100% of the time within 90° of rotation and 98.7% with more than a 90° rotation.