Micromouse - competition for little robots

Micromouse is a competition for small mouse mice to find their way to the center of a maze with 16x16 cells. The event is popular in many countries, especially in the UK, Japan and South Korea. The labyrinth is a grid of squares of 16 pieces in length and width, each square has a wall size of 18 cm and a height of 5 cm. The



mouse is a fully autonomous robot that must find its way to the center of the labyrinth. To do this, he needs to track his own location, discover the walls and explore the maze. As soon as the mouse reaches the goal, it performs a reverse search in the maze until it finds the optimal route from the beginning to the center. Once the optimal route is found, the mouse will reach the center very quickly.

The robot can accelerate to three meters per second. Currently, a robot only needs a few seconds to reach its goal, depending on the design of the maze.

Mice can use various search algorithms. The most popular are, of course, A * and variations of the Bellman algorithm.

The figure shows that it is important to find not only the shortest path, but also optimally calculate the trajectory of movement. In the upper right corner, instead of turning, the robot travels straight, without wasting time on extra turns.

Electronic mice themselves look different:






In the video, the robot reaches the target in 3.921 seconds.