implementation and investigation of a distributed robotic chess system

Abstract

This thesis presents and evaluates a distributed robotic system that successfully integrates a native Windows chess engine (Fritz 19) with a containerized ROS2-based robot control system, operating on a single host computer. The architecture is designed to solve the common challenge of bridging disparate operating systems in real-time robotics. Performance analysis over 35 moves demonstrates the architecture’s high reliability, achieving a 100% success rate in the software pipeline from command generation to execution planning. The study quantifies the system’s primary performance bottleneck, showing that the physical robot movement averaged 22.6 seconds, while the underlying communication latency was negligible at 2.89 ms. This highlights a crucial distinction between computational speed and the challenges of physical manipulation. Compared to existing human-robot chess systems, which typically operate within a single OS or rely heavily on computer vision, this work contributes a validated architectural alternative. Its primary contribution is a single-host framework that integrates a native Windows application with a containerized ROS2 system. This provides a robust solution for developers needing to bridge disparate software ecosystems in real-time robotics and establishes a performance baseline demonstrating that such integration is highly efficient