5 ms·
I did this competition in college, and I was obsessed! This post brings up a lot of nostalgia for me. I partnered with my EE friends, and I built the software.
by iamcasen 3y ago
I did this competition in college, and I was obsessed! This post brings up a lot of nostalgia for me. I partnered with my EE friends, and I built the software. I devised my implementation of the flood-fill by writing VB scripts in excel spreadsheets. I would draw out the maze in the spreadsheet by coloring the cells, then I would use VBA to navigate the maze and color in the solution.
Of course, the final implementation was written in C and loaded on a microcontroller. Back in those days my options were much more limited. I can only imagine what's available these days.
I actually had the itch to tinker with micromouse again not too long ago, but I became dismayed with the difficulty in setting up a physical maze for the robot. I think access to the mazes themselves is the biggest limiting factor.
- newaccount74 3y ago> the difficulty in setting up a physical maze for the robot Couldn't you just buy a sheet of plywood, some wood strips, and a bit of wood glue? I mean, setting up a maze will take some time, sure, but it's hardly difficult. Or am I missing something?
- jsharf 3y agoThey need to be dimensioned and finished quite accurately. Most plywood has a slight bend to it. At the speeds and accelerations needed to be competitive, any imperfection would mean your car will fly off the track or hit a wall.
- lelandbatey 3y agoYes you can build your own, but it's tougher to get right than you might think. Those tiny robots are incredibly sensitive to the conditions of the maze, and you can get things wrong quite easily. You could build the whole thing to all the millimeter tolerances, then learn that oh no, your white paint actually has some undisclosed additives that absorb IR light instead of reflecting it, meaning you have to complete re-paint and re-sand all the walls in your 9-square-meter maze. Oops. You can do it, but it's still quite tough; in many ways tougher and less fun than building the mouse. Link to some helpful notes on building your own Micromouse maze: https://micromouseonline.com/micromouse-book/mazes-and-maze-solving/construction/ https://micromouseonline.com/micromouse-book/mazes-and-maze-...
- KennyBlanken 3y agoWhy would you construct an entire 9 square meter maze without testing a small portion? If only for having a physically convenient way of quickly validating hardware and software changes? Why would you paint the entire thing without testing the materials, or asking the organizers what paint they use / how to validate your own maze, or asking among fellow competitors?
- blopp99 3y agoThank you for the link! Are there other resources you can share ? I'm building a database to make a local competition
- Frenchgeek 3y agoI wonder if something like the "while True:learn()" game would allow to iterate robots rapidly...
- fho 3y agoThere was a short demonstration on the state-of-the art of Robocup kinematics [1]. I guess the next micromouse tournaments will equally benefit from end-to-end training of the mice. [1] https://twitter.com/haarnoja/status/1651577815836270596 https://twitter.com/haarnoja/status/1651577815836270596