Sambot - MeArm, servos, the Babelboard and Jetson Nano
![Image](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWS3feEjcHuqtu1UeGdlWa3dPDo4frHnDkhknyqyu55npRI9p0jiCSQrU_1F8PKznE5mgFvj8muI0_Yk5MEEcQW1UilgC541Qh8mb3eCTyG3Ag0luZphPF3TNc0H3jB3SwHaEKJGRWzLM/s320/512px-CheckersStandard.jpg)
Jud McCranie CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons Way back in 1974 I took Tom Westerdale's Adaptive Systems course as part of my Masters degree. Tom's thesis advisor was John Holland, and a lot of the course covered genetic algorithms. Before that it covered early machine learning applications like Samuel's Checkers Player . I've wanted to revisit those early AI applications for a while, and I recently decided to put a new spin on an old idea. I want to build a robot that plays Checkers (that's draughts to us Brits) using a real board, a robot arm and a Jetson Nano using a Raspberry Pi camera. The game play could be done using a variant of Samuel's approach, a Neural network, or a combination of the two. If AlphaGo can master Go playing against itself it shouldn't be too hard for a pair of Machine Learning programs to maser draughts! First, though, I need to build a controllable arm that can pick up and move the pieces and a computer vision system t