Micromouse

Competition

CAMM @ UCSD

Summary

The California Micromouse competition (CAMM) has been around since its introduction by IEEE in 1977. The original competition featured a 10x10 grid maze and was led by a wall-following mouse.

Applicants are put in teams of five and go through the process of designing, fabricating, testing and competing with their mouse. The IEEE UC San Diego Micromouse Project founded in Fall 2006 is consistently our largest and most celebrated project. To meet popular demand, we’ve established and hosted our own competition since 2011 called the California Micromouse Competition (CAMM). Every year we receive more than 200 applications and are able to sponsor 40 UC San Diego students to participate in the Micromouse Project, we also attract multiple schools from the west coast to attend CAMM. The Micromouse Project challenges student-led teams to create autonomous robotic ‘mice’ programmed to solve a 16x16 cell maze. Robots must travel from a predetermined starting cell to the center of the maze with no outside assistance or human control. To do this, mice are designed to explore, remember, and navigate the maze. During competition teams have 10 attempts to clock the fastest time to the maze center. Skills applied during this project include:

• EagleCAD:
  • PCB circuit design doubles as the vehicle chassis
  • V-Regs and H-Bridges properly power embedded controllers and high current motors
• Digital Signal Processing:
  • Regression modeling for different types of sensors like infrared transistors, motor encoders, accelerators, and gyroscopes
• Programming:
  • Microcontrollers like the Teensy and Arduino
  • Sometimes embedded programming for ARM processors and IC's such as STM32F, LPC24x, PIC, and MBED. Students are provided toolchain suggestions but mostly compile their code on their own.
  • Navigation and vehicle control most commonly implemented with PID and flood fill algorithms.