"Mill" is a two-player strategy board game. The objective is to form "mills," which are three pieces in a row along a straight line. Once a mill is formed, the player can remove one of their opponent's pieces from the board. The game is won by either reducing the opponent's pieces to two or by blocking their pieces so they can't move anymore. It requires strategic thinking and foresight to win. This becomes especially interesting when the game is played by robots combined with artificial intelligence.

Four students of the University of Applied Sciences Kempten have made this challenge their task. They have developed a robot-vision-system that is able to play mill like humans. In this interview, Marco Ulrich, research associate, tells us which challenges they faced during their project work, which solutions they found and how the AI vision system IDS NXT was able to support them.