Robots are rushing off the production lines to fill
all sorts of niches previously filled by people or animals. It’s almost a month
ago (November 8th to be exact) that I posted about the swarms of
robot trashcans descending on young children with the dual purpose of cleaning
up the streets and training the kids to be tidy. Not all robots have been
produced with such high minded ideals, though.
An animal that has long been the focus to be
robotically simulated is the mouse. What do you do with a robotic mouse? Well,
you do what a lot of cognitive scientists have long done with live mice, that
is, you put them in a maze.
The 32 All Japan Micromouse Championship was run
last month in Tsukuba. The suffix “micro” is a bit of a misnomer, though, as
the mice are a little larger than computer mice. More the size of a small rat
really, so they would be better classified as “Mini-Mouse”, but that name may
have gender and IP implications in spite of the spelling.
The competition is very mouse-lab-like in that the
mice are placed in a large maze. They have an orientation run where they scurry
around digitizing the layout and then they get down to serious business. This
consists of a series of timed runs with the winner being declared the Big
Cheese who gets through the maze in the least time.
Clearly going down blind alleys is bad and going
too fast can mean crashes, which negate that run. The big news this year is
that the speed record was broken with the winner clocking a time of 3.921 seconds
(1). Previously the 4-second barrier looked uncrackable, but Ng Beng Kiat’s
micromouse, Min 7, pushed through the pain barrier of a bug in his algorithm
and cracked it to take 1st place. A photo library of the winner is available on
Ng’s website (2).
Ning5 is also from the Ng Beng Kiat stable and came
second in the half-size micromouse event after having had to cope with the same
algorithmic bug. Ng and his stable comes from Singapore. He works at the Alpha
Center there and robot mice kits are available to help get aspiring trainers
started. The competition circuit is world wide and the beasties are easier to
transport than horses.
I’m left with one idle thought. Surely a much smaller
version of a micromouse shouldn’t be saddled with such a name as a “half-size
micromouse,” but should have a proper title of its own. Maybe “Nanomouse”
would fit the current fetish for all things nano.
- http://www.robots-dreams.com/2011/11/ng-beng-kiat-nails-the-2011-all-japan-micromouse-competition-video.html
- http://www.np.edu.sg/alpha/nbk/
