News

Imperial College Robot Team aims for Eurobot

Posted Sat, 23/01/2010 - 05:33 by peteh

Imperial College are intending to field a team in the Eurobot competition in May 2010. On their public blog they are busy providing interesting updates on their progress. For those not familiar with Eurobot, this is a large, international amateur robotics contest that has been running since 1998.

Find out more about Eurobot here:
http://www.eurobot.org/eng/index.php

UK Micromouse 2009 personal photos

Posted Thu, 09/07/2009 - 01:17 by peteh

jpgs-112Here is the first set of photos from the 2009 UK micromouse competition held in Birmingham on June 27th. These photos are taken by me and there are not very many because I was pretty busy.

UK Micromouse 2009 preliminary

Posted Sun, 28/06/2009 - 19:40 by peteh

IMG_3721 The UK Micromouse championships were held at the Technology innovation Centre in Birmingham on Saturday June 27th. A good number of mice ran this year, some for the first time. The morning practice was a nerve-wracking affair which looked like it would result in another win by MouseX. However, a couple of mechanical repairs, some software tweaks and an unusually fortunate maze configuration saw a new champion emerge...

UK Schools Micromouse 2009

Posted Sun, 28/06/2009 - 17:59 by peteh

By Bernard Grabowski

The 2009 National Schools and Colleges Micromouse competition took place on Saturday 27th June at the Technology Innovation Centre in Birmingham.  The team from John Hampden Grammar School were once again strongly represented.  They have dominated the event for several years but this time were pushed to the limit by teams from three debuting schools.  Competition was intense and new event best times were recorded.  The existing drag race record (2.132 seconds, set last year by the team from Singapore) was smashed several times and now stands at an incredible 1.699 sec.  The track is just less than 7m in length and the mouse had to stop under control within 1m beyond the finish line.  Peak acceleration must now be around 1g in this event and braking has to start at just past the halfway mark.

Robot Racer - line followers in Japan

Posted Wed, 09/07/2008 - 17:24 by peteh

There has been some talk of changing the schools micromouse competitions. I am in favour of a more flexible line-following class of competitions. While doing a bit of research, I found many examples of the kind of thing I had in mind. Given that these competitions are much more popular in South East Asia, I was not surprised to find that most of the information and examples were to be found in Japan. What I was surprised to find was just how well advanced the state of the art is over there.