The New Technology Foundation have announced the dates of the 32nd All Japan Micromouse Tournament. The event will be held in Tsukuba on Friday 18th November 2011 to Sunday 20th November 2011. Full details on the NTF web site.
The moment of inertia of a micromouse is a useful number to know. It tells you how easy or hard your mouse will be to turn and lets you calculate an appropriate value for the angular acceleration during the lead-in and lead-out of the turn. Indeed, you may find out the upper limits or what your mouse can achieve. the race is, after all, won in the turns they say. So, how can you find out what the moment of inertia is for your mouse?
The results for the 2010 All Japan Micromouse Contest have now been published: http://www.ntf.or.jp/mouse/micromouse2010/2010result_m-classi-cexpert_final.html
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….
On Saturday November 28th 2009, we held out our semi-formal winter event for the micromouse and small robot builder. Held at Millennium Point in Birmingham and made possible by Birmingham City University, this is an ideal opportunity to get in a bit of mid-year competition and size up the opposition before those long winter nights of robot building and tweaking…
The 30th All Japan Micromouse Contest will run from Saturday November 21 to Monday Noember 23rd 2009 in Tsukuba. The organisers have released the rules for this event and there are a couple of surprises…
Video from the UK Micromouse 2009 competition is now available on YouTube. These cover the maze solver and non-contact wall follower classes.
Birmingham City University hosts the UK micromouse competition and without its generous support, the event would be a poor shadow of it current self. Here are some pictures taken by the University’s photographer.