Robots and Systems
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1 August 2004
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The Micromouse Championship was organised by University of Central England's Technology Inovation Centre (TIC) and held in the Think Tank at Millennium Point, Birmingham on Saturday 19th of June.
See www.tic.ac.uk/micromouse. The competition results have to go through the official channels to be put on the TIC website so expect them there 'real soon now'!
I was there as an invited guest (read 'floorshow for visitors'), I had a collection of my walkers on display at the entrance to the Think Tank. Also Ian Swan was there with Mincer his biped walker and Roger Starnes should have been there with Scarlet (see below) but wasn't well.
From the TIC there were a couple of radio controlled (human controlled) 'robots'!!!! pushing a football about and a table with standard Lego RCX line-following robots. (cutting edge stuff eh! Dohh.)
Apart from watching a couple of mice and going to David Ottan's (MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology) presentation I didn't see much of the competition and have no idea of the winner. There were a good number of entrants and the event ran over time. Alan Dibley did his usual MC job and it was nice to see Dave Woodfield's championship mice still run.
Dave Ottan's talk on the MIT mice was very informative and his video of Japanese and Korean mice was amazing, they are just so small and fast.
One of the competitors was running a commercial off-the-shelf Korean mouse which comes with C source and compiler but he hadn't made any software changes. It was quite obvious from this mouse and the video that the Far East still place importance on practical robotics rather than the simulations prefered in the West, no doubt that is why they are the best.