@aberrant68 I wrote a blog post on the AprilTags a little while ago (https://blog.fixermark.com/posts/2022/april-tags-python-recognizer/).
For recognizing them in competition, the team I'm working with is using Raspberry Pis with PhotonVision (https://photonvision.org/). This solution is pretty plug-and-play (modulo the challenge of getting a Raspberry Pi and networking switch mounted and powered on the robot chassis)---once you get it working, it'll auto-recognize the tags and dump all the relevant data (either via NetworkTables or directly via a library for the robot code).