With the the Japan 2010 contest only about three weeks away, there is a burst in activity from Japanese mouse builders as they prepare for the contest. Most recently, Kato-san shows us how close to the edge a top-performing mouse will have to run.
The date for the 2010 RoboTIC event has now been set for Saturday, November 27th 2010. As in previous years, the event will be held at Millenium Point in Birmingham. RoboTIC is a fairly informal event. More details will follow here or at the BCU site at http://www.tic.ac.uk/micromouse
On October 2nd, the 2010 Taiwan micromouse contest was held at Southern Taiwan University. The hosts took first and second prize in the micromouse contest with Lung Hwa University taking third place along with first and third in the robotrace line follower contest. For a more complete report from Juing-Huei,…
Updated my camera today. The Casio Exilim EX-FH100 is a newer version of the EX-FC100. It does everything the older one did and then adds a few more features. Oh, and it is black. Somehow, that makes it better just for that reason.
While I could hardly be called a fan of football, at least getting robots to play the game gives it some character. A recent edition of The Gadget Show had an item from Pollyanna Woodward on the 2010 RoboCup contest held in Singapore on Jun 28th.
Simpler is often a good thing. For the new mouse, I wanted to make the sensor arrangement as simple as possible. One way is to drive the emitters from the battery supply… (more…)
Wondrous though the STM32 (ARM Cortex M3) might be, it makes something of a meal of atomic access to individual bits in memory. The technique used is called bit-banding. Although it is simple enough in concept and pretty friendly to the assembly language programmer, it is easy enough to get lost in C. Or should that be at C?
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By far the most commonly used micromouse sensors are simple reflective types that give an indication of distance by measuring how much light is reflected from the maze wall. While the response is repeatable and related to distance, it is quite difficult to get an accurate answer. This is how the sensor readings can be converted into an actual distance… (more…)
On June 26th 2010, Birmingham City University hosted the UK micromouse championships as part of their robot festival event. Along with the micromouse event, there were wall follower, line follower, sumo, ant weight, biped robots and much more. With the welcome presence of St Joseph’s Institute from Singapore, this year’s…
After a shaky start, Decimus 2 wins the day in Birmingham at the 2010 UK micromouse contest. After all the hours of preparation and lost sleep, the time had come for the new mouse to prove itself. Decimus 1 (D1) was a relatively know quantity in that it had won…