This is where the fun really begins. Contestants arrive for qualifying day at the All Japan Micromouse Contest. One contest will be decided completely today, the others have a qualifying phase which determines who goes through to the final tomorrow…
Friday is practice day. Well, half day would be more accurate. In the afternoon, the venue is open and the mazes and practice circuits are laid out for anyone to test their robot’s basic functions. Everyone is busy setting up, making sure things work as they should and getting a good look at the other entries. Since we had the morning spare, we went an watched the Real World Robot Contest first…
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The time had come. Get on a plane fly east to see what the the world’s best micromouse builders can produce. It is not all micromouse of course – there are line followers and autonomous metropolitan robots – all sorts of things. This year, I must pay more attention to some of the other contests. It is a fair trip. Door to door was about 22 hours and if you include the time before it is possible to check in to the hotel, it comes to an even 24 hours. Arrival in Tsukuba was at 12:15….
Time to gather the bits and pieces needed to take to the All Japan Micromouse Contest in Tsukuba. First job is to put it all in one place to see how much there is. Too much it seems. The gear is divided into two lots. One package goes in thehold in the main baggage. This is stuff that I could manage without if the bag failed to arrive. The other lot goes with me. This has to include everything I need to run the contest.
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 Official results for the 2009 All Japan Micromouse Contest have been posted to the New Technology Foundation web site:http://www.robomedia.org/micromouse2009/2009result.html
Finals day! I really expected to be nothing more than a spectator today so I was pretty excited about the fact that I would be able to run in the finals. No matter what happened, I felt that was a bit of an achievement. Apart from any nervousness, this was a fairly relaxed day. We could concentrate on watching the other contests as they were being run one after another. First up was the robotrace line follower contest…
Sunday crept up on me after another poor night’s sleep. Today was the all-important qualifying contest. In many ways, this was quite a relaxed day. After breakfast we went down to the Capio, got our gear set up and watched the opening ceremony. Once that was done, there was not much else to do except look at robots, watch the other contests and wait for our turn in the qualifying session. With 77 entrants to the expert class, the qualifiers were run on two mazes at the same time…
I didn’t get much sleep at all on my first night in Japan. Or any of the others in fact. Probably over-excited. the view from the hotel room was pretty good what with the rocket, the planetarium and Mt Tsukuba all beautifully lit by the rising sun. Having missed out on the Akihabara experience on the day before, I resolved to take the Tsukuba Express and have a look this morning…
The 2009 All Japan Micromouse contest was held during the weekend of November 21-23 in Tsukuba. I was very fortunate in being able to attend and compete with some of the best mice in the world. This event was combined with the Robotrace line follower contest and the Microclipper event. In case that was not enough, the Tsukuba Challenge real world robot event was held the same weekend.