Micromouse

Micromouse is an event where small robot mice solve a 16x16 maze. Events are held worldwide, and are most popular in the UK, U.S., Japan, Singapore and South Korea. The mice are completely autonomous robots that must find their way from a predetermined starting position to the central area of the maze unaided. The mouse will need to keep track of where it is, discover walls as it explores, map out the maze and detect when it has reached the goal. Having reached the goal, the mouse will typically perform additional searches of the maze until it has found an optimal route from the start to the center. Once the optimal route has been found, the mouse will run that route in the shortest possible time. Mice can run at up to three meters per second, with current world records around 6~7 seconds.

In this project, the UCSD micromouse team is required to build a mouse from scratch and write its own software to run the mouse. The first component of building the mouse is choosing what hardware to use, which include a circuit board (works as the brain of the mouse), motors and wheels (legs), sensors (eyes), and battery.

The second part of the project is to write the "AI" and motor control so the mouse can actually move and make decisions about where to go. Here the team was able to incorporate their programming knowledge into the code that was embedded into the brain of the mouse (the micro controller unit, MCU).

IEEE Micromouse Rules