Pac-Man Pete: An extensible framework for building AI in VEX Robotics
This provides an incremental framework for building AI in educational robotics competitions, specifically targeting VEX Robotics teams.
The authors developed a fully autonomous robot for the VEX Robotics Tipping Point AI Competition by creating three components: a Unity simulation with reinforcement learning training, a computer vision pipeline, and a data transfer pipeline to offload computations from the microcontroller. They released these components as an extensible framework to enable reuse and innovation in educational robotics.
This technical report details VEX Robotics team BLRSAI's development of a fully autonomous robot for VEX Robotics' Tipping Point AI Competition. We identify and develop three separate critical components. This includes a Unity simulation and reinforcement learning model training pipeline, a malleable computer vision pipeline, and a data transfer pipeline to offload large computations from the VEX V5 Brain/micro-controller to an external computer. We give the community access to all of these components in hopes they can reuse and improve upon them in the future, and that it'll spark new ideas for autonomy as well as the necessary infrastructure and programs for AI in educational robotics.