Arduino League

First it was physical sports, then came eSports - now comes the age of AI Sports, where robots using Artificial Intelligence compete! Watch AI controlled cars play soccer in Arduino League!

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Inspiration

In the hit game Rocket League, rocket-powered cars play giant soccer (and it's super epic). In a different arena, chess AI's compete in super-intelligent high-performance-computing games (humans are obsolete). These served as our inspiration for the next revolution in competitive gaming - AI Sports, where AI robots compete in an epic game of soccer! We hope to inspire programmers and engineers everywhere to construct sophisticated AI and soccer-playing robots to one day compete against each other!

What it does

In the Arduino League the players are programmers - but they never touch the game field. Our car operates under an AI we programmed, equipped with ultrasonic sensors to read in its surroundings. It is able to detect the ball and then drive towards it to hit it towards the enemy goal. We are working on code that allows the car to detect walls, position itself in the arena with an internal navigation system, track its orientation, and roughly track the ball. A feature we are hoping to making in the future is an aiming system where the car attacks the ball from the perfect angle to shoot on the goal.

How we built it

We used an Arduino board, ultrasonic sound transducers, a lithium-ion battery, breadboards, DC motors, tires, and H-Bridges. We 3D printed the base of the car in ABS and affixed the other components to it. We then had to wire the components together properly. Finally, we programmed the AI using the Arduino language, tested extensively, and refined our code for bugs as well as improvements to the sophistication of the AI.

Challenges We ran into

We only had the resources for one car (the limiting factor being the Arduino boards), so the game is played against a human rolling the bar at the car, but ideally the game is a competition between two AI's programmed by different people! We also ran into many issues with hardware, since none of us are experts in wiring or Arduino boards, but we worked hard and learned a lot, and managed to create a car that drives and thinks by itself!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are excited that we got our car to move and think autonomously! This is a proof-of-concept for arbitrarily intelligent on-board strategy code, to respond to the game environment in a sophisticated way! We are also proud that we were able to wire our car properly, despite none of us being hardware experts. The 3D printed base also turned out perfectly (on the second try)!

What we learned

We learned how to use the Arduino language in conjunction with an Arduino board. We also learned how the individual components work together, such as the ultrasonic sensors and H-Bridge.

What's next for Arduino League

This is just the beginning of a new revolution in competitive gaming! Arduino League will pave the way for international-scale competitive AI Sports, where brilliant coders and engineers represent their cities and countries to create clever AI-controlled robots to compete in sports! The potential sophistication of the on-board AI has no bounds, and the game possibilities are limitless!

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