Rhodes Colleg e 2000 N . Parkway \lemphis . TN 3311 .2 stuart@mathcs .rhodes .ed u 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Abstrac t This report presents work clone by the Artificia l Intelligence and Robotics class of Summer Scholars 1993 at Rhodes College . Summer Scholars provides college credit for intensive two-week course s taken by high school students . The goal of thi s course was to develop software to play the gam e Connect 1 and to control a robotic arm making th e moves . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

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... 0 CD 0 0 0 Figure 1 : The Connect -1 Playing Boar d 4 1 Connect 4 The game Connect 4 is played on a vertical grid o f six rows and seven columns as illustrated in Figure 1 . Players take turns dropping checkers int o columns of the board . Each checker falls to the row immediately above the last which was playe d in that column . Initial drops in any column land i n the bottom row. The object of the game is to create a board configuration in which four of a player' s pieces are in a contiguous horizontal . vertical or diagonal (+45°) line . 2 The RoboAr m Each checker played by the computer is moved ove r the selected column and dropped by a robot ar m (RoboArm) on loan to the college by Goldenrod Research Corp of Spalding . NE. The arm has five degrees of freedom : the base (Motor 1) . the shoulder (Motor 2) . the elbow (\[otor 3) . the wrist (Motor 1 ) and the hand (Motor 5) [1] . The base axis is oriented vertically. allowing 251° of left/right motion SIGCSE Vol . 26 No . 2 June 199 4 BULLETIN for the arm . The shoulder axis is oriented horizontally allowing the -upper arm" 95° of movemen t about the vertical . Approximately 30° of movement toward the rear of the unit and approximatel y 65° toward the front are allowed . The elbow axis i s also oriented horizontally to allow the "forearm" t o move up or down from the horizontal . Total movement allowed for the elbow is 85°. The wrist axis runs parallel to the forearm . allowing the hand t o twist . This axis was not used in this project . Th e hand motor allows opening and closing of a gripper attachment . All motors in the RohoArm ar e free-running DC motors . The robot provides an RS-232 connection fo r command messages . Each command message t o the robot consists of one or more bytes, the firs t of which is the command byte . For command s which indicate movement (except open and close) . a subsequent argument byte is sent representing th e number of degrees to move . Command sequences may be stored in a buffe r for later execution . This feature was used for all