ScrabBot

In this project, ScrabBot, a Whole Arm Manipulator (WAM) robotic arm from Barrett technologies is currently under  development to  be the  perfect  companion  and  game  opponent. This  robot  is  7-DOF  and consists of three main parts: Barrett WAM arm to physically move tiles and execute the gameplay, a pyKinect Azure camera for computer vision purposes, and an AI agent that would serve as the brain  of  the  robot.  For  the  robotic  arm,  a  controller  is  deployed  on  Robotic  Operating  System (ROS) using an external IK solver. For computer vision, OpenCV is used for letter detection and an OCR library is to be used for character recognition. For the AI agent, our project will develop an  innovative  AI  agent  using  novel  techniques  such  as  reinforcement  learning  algorithms  to improve on currently-existing approaches in the literature. Moreover, our AI agent’s design will push the robot towards playing more frequently-used words in order to make the robot sound more like a human companion. This robot will not be limited to playing Scrabble but will be able to play any similar game like chess. However, for the purposes of the Capstone Project delivery, we will only be developing an AI agent for Scrabble.

Please click here to view the video of the project demonstration.

Project Details

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