Nayim – April Blog

This month was the conclusion of our micromouse project. We completed the physical build of the micromouse. This included the shell, the touchbars, the IR sensors and the white line sensors. Additionally, our special features were completed. This included the indicator lights and reverse lights which simulates an autonomous vehicle. The OLED screen was another special feature for our micromouse, which we used to display different outputs from the sensors of the micromouse.

In addition to the physical hardware, the software side of the micromouse was completed with 3 fully functional modes: obstacle avoidance, white line following and combat. While obstacle avoidance and white line following were mostly completed in the previous months, we added further changes to fully ensure that the micromouse would behave the way we wanted.

The combat mode was the final section of the code to be completed. We allowed the robot to stay in the white section of the arena so that it would not fall out. Additionally, we made sure that our touchbars would cause the micromouse to reverse then drive forward again to push the opponent in a sumo wrestling style. We programmed our micromouse to use the limited number of IR sensors to its advantage by ocassionally spinning in a circle when it has not detected an opponent for a certain amount of time. This is to help our micromouse to find its opponent. When the micromouse does see something directly in front of it by triggering both IR sensors, it will speed up towards the target in order to push them out of the ring.

During the trip to Gregynog, we made some final adjustments, such as fixing an issue where the micromouse would reboot if the touchbar was hit while it was on the edge of the arena. We were inspected on our micromouse’s abilities for obstacle avoidance, white line following and combat. Our micromouse was found to be strongest in its combat mode, while its weakest mode was the white line following, where our micromouse would wobble as it tries to navigate the line. We managed to win an award for having the best technical inspection. This is due to our special features, mainly the OLED screen which was used to creatively show the information found by the micromouse. Furthermore, our shell design was well thought out as we could easily remove the top half to perform maintainance on the micromouse.

During the combat tournament, we won 3 games but lost 3 games. We managed to secure a placement within the top 8 since we lost in the quarter finals match.

Overall, I am happy with what we managed to achieve during the course of the year, by creating a well working micromouse which passed all the required assessments and the special features and touches that our group implemented to truly make our micromouse unique among the competition. We worked well as a team which made the group work enjoyable.

Previous blog – March