Micromouse Online

MINOS is the annual UK micromouse conference. A grand term for a great weekend. This year's event was last weekend - April 12th and 13th. Once again, the whole thing was organised by Adrian Johnstone and Janet Hales from Royal Holloway College, University of London. 

The weekend followed the now familiar pattern of technical talks and presentations on the Saturday followed by a very good meal at a nearby restaurant in the evening. Those of us who still had some energy left then sat up putting the world to rights over an extra beer or glass of wine. We were treated to the luxury of brand new halls of residence this year. All sparkling clean and fresh.

On the sunday, after a hearty breakfast, everybody gathers back in the Department of Computer Science building for some hands-on mouse tuning and practice. There is an infomal competition around lunchtime to round the session off. This year everyone was greatly surprised to find that the walls of the maze seemed to be absorbing more IR than before. Same walls, same maze, same room but IR reflectance was down by perhaps 30% from when it was used last year. Nobody could really work out why but a good bit of tweaking of sensors soon had nearly everyone running as well (or badly) as before.

The presentations this year set a new standard for interesting and relevant technical content. Here is the programme:

MINOS08 Programme 

Dave Otten	Inertial Navigation with Accelerometers on MITEE Mouse 11 - Any Chance?
Richard Nock	Machine Vision for micromouse
Pete Harrison	system design / primus / half size
David Hannaford	Intelligent Mice
Michael Beatus	My experiences with developing my first micromouse (First Step)
Rob Probin	Colour vision processing for wall detection
Duncan Louttit	chassis design
Tony Wilcox	VHDL and programmable logic for custom peripherals
Martyn Pittuck	Robotics at Reading
Derek Hall	Techfest 2008. Micromouse in India

Where available, the PDF icon will get you a copy of the slides and the camera icon will get you a video of the presentation.

Read on for a summary of each presentation...