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My first thought was "those nudged pieces can surely be put back in place automatically using the same exact mechanism!".

I was also thinking that each piece could have a magnet at the base. And when a piece is captured, the underlying gantry could flip the polarity with an electromagnet and sorta launch the captured piece off the board.

Although it seemed like the author had other issues with using an electromagnet here (i.e. overheating / switching polarity).

For a hobby project seems like good progress.

Polishing the last 20% of functionalities will take him a lifetime. Maybe other chess/robotic enthusiast could join him to accelerate some border cases.

I don't see this as "labor having for the human" but rather as a way to immerse yourself into the fantasy that you're playing another being.

Yeah the videos were far from impressive...

On the other hand, it's certainly more impressive than almost anything I've put together in the past five years.