After implementing PID, Motion Profiling, and Odometery in Vex Robotics, I wanted to take this to the next level and try to implement Reinforcement Learning via Machine Learning as a side fun project to better understand and grasp the ideas of AI through VEX Robotics. I am looking out to see if others would like to collaborate with me on this topic. If you are interested in joining, contact me through discord. 
Username: Robotic Pizza#9607.
LMAO. The amount of iterations this is going to take to train seems unreasonable. Sounds like fun though.
There was a somewhat recent discussion on VTOW, and the consensus is (as it always has been) that there is no use for machine learning in vex, given the limited processing of the brain and not much sensor information to process.
https://discordapp.com/channels/197777408198180864/198658294007463936/713471753502064730
Edit:
Here are the relevant quotes:
From Thomas | Hail
On the note about using “AI” in autonomous, I don’t think the v5 Brain can handle any remotely intensive ML application. You should however be using sensors in autonomous to make sure your routine is accurate and precise. decision making autonomous programs are extremely complicated and due to the isolated nature of both the VRC and VEXU auton periods I don’t believe having any decision making would be worthwhile due to the time it would take to code for not the greatest of gains. If you do want to check out robots doing decision making in a vex setting the VAIC competition is starting up this season which will be fully autonomous bots, most with complex onboard decision making
From me:
technically the v5 brain has enough hardware to make it possible to run a ml model on tensorflow lite
but yeah,
- no decision making (or obstacle avoidance) needed in VRC/VEXU
- I have no idea what you would use ML for, the sensors aren’t great and you don’t have a ton of data in the first place
- the v5 can’t train a model, so you will have to find a way to simulate/get data from the v5 and train on a pc
Only way I could see this being done effectively is through the use of some simulator (namely gazebo), to simulate games but, as stated above, the amount of iterations to achieve even a small amount of success pretty much rules this out.
If you are truly interested in machine learning, start a VEX AI team. I personally cannot wait for the upcoming season and like the idea of competing against collegiate students.
I also heard rumors that vex was considering legalizing raspberry pi’s for vrc, which would definitely make ml viable in vrc (most likely not anytime soon though).
V5 does not have the power or the reason to implement machine learning.
but, if you’re doing that, might I suggest a blockchain as well?
As I understand it, blockchains are used, mostly in cryptocurrency, to increase security. Not as a way to store data that is not really all that private.
yes I understand, I was just making a joke about how everything these days is blockchain machine learning because those are the buzzwords that sell kickstarter campaigns
My team has been thinking about doing this for a while now and we would be willing to collaborate on a project like this, I think we have a few workarounds to the limited processing power of the vex brain and I would like to discuss. I friended you on discord, my username is Shoes#7777
So I would definitely use machine learning for VAIC but adding reinforcement learning to fully autonomous robot would be something I did only after everything worked. There would likely be some performance increase on your robot with replacing an existing high level strategy AI with a learned one. Until you are at the point of having everything else sorted out though, there is no point.
@1961Z were you thinking with only game-legal equipment, or outside of that? I think it is reasonable to add a Raspberry Pi and a Google Coral to do vision processing. This approach is commonly used in FRC. In FRC, vision processing is useful enough that there is a standard Rasp. Pi image for it, and in 2020, an intern made a semi-official ML model to track game elements, using AWS SageMaker and the Coral. One thing that you would have to figure out is how to facilitate communication between the Rasp. Pi and the V5 brain. The Rasp. Pi can be connected by USB to the V5, and C++ I/O statements should work for this, but I have not seen a bona fide code example with VexCode. I have seen one with RobotMesh only.
Most of the examples for this around are actually in PROS. As well as the alternative method that uses the smart ports.