We are 6ix Pac, a team representing the University of Toronto Robotics Association (UTRA) at the Harvard and UIUC PacBots competitions. This competition involves teams designing a small robot to compete in a life sized version of the game Pac-Man.

Our design combines wheels, motors and sensors to allow the robot to know where it is and move around the maze successfully. The motors have quadrature encoders on the end to keep track of how far the robot has moved, and we have four time-of-flight sensors to detect our distance from each wall, and help us localize the robot. This is all connected to a Raspberry Pi, which communicates with the game engine and our custom algorithm that decides the optimal move at every point in the game. All of this has to fit inside of a small form factor, constrained by the dimensions of the maze itself, which is why a custom PCB would be tremendously helpful. It would enable us to fit the Raspberry Pi and all the necessary peripherals, as well as allowing for repairs and debugging of components without having to keep track of an error-prone mess of jumper wires.