Paper ID: 2211.14385

Pac-Man Pete: An extensible framework for building AI in VEX Robotics

Jacob Zietek, Nicholas Wade, Cole Roberts, Aref Malek, Manish Pylla, Will Xu, Sagar Patil

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.

Submitted: Nov 25, 2022