All images on this site, unless otherwise indicated are © Wayne Allen, Royal Holloway 1998-2004. You may, if you wish use these images without charge for non commercial, non profit making purposes, provided that the image is credited as above. All other rights are reserved.

What is Micromouse?

Micromouse is an annual robotics competition in which autonomous robot 'mice' compete against each other to solve a 16 by 16 maze in the shortest time. Each square of the maze is 18cm by 18cm. The walls are 5cm high and 1.2 cm thick.

Mice can be as simple as a Lego Mindstorms kit with light and touch sensors, or as complex as a vision guided chassis with DC motors controlled by a Digital Signal Processing chip.

Separate trophies are awarded (normally in the form of brass cheeses) for beginners and experienced mouse handlers in schools, university, industry and private entry categories.

In the UK the national Micromouse competition had been run under the auspices of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) for some years. Following the 1999 competition at Exeter, the IEE reluctantly decided to concentrate on the new schools micromouse competition (which is based on line following) and to withdraw from the senior competition.

The Computer Science department at Royal Holloway took over the hosting of the national Micromouse championships in the year 2000. The annual events go from strength to strength with the most recent event , hosted for the first time at the Technology Innovation Center, Birmingham, UK on Saturday June 19th 2004 (Click for details)

We also host an informal monthly Micromouse meeting, normally on the last Wednesday evening of each month.(for more details email Wayne.

Getting a fully working mouse prepared for competition is a daunting task, so we also have a simpler 'wall follower' class which uses the same full sized maze, but with a guaranteed left hand connected path from start to the center goal. This allows simple mice that have no maze solving ability to navigate from the start to the finish simply by tracking the left hand wall. Within this site we describe such a mouse constructed using the Lego Mindstorms kit, so anybody can join in even if you are not up to building processor boards and motor drivers.

The rules of the main competition can be read here, and the modified rules for the wall-follower class are here.

Annual Conference

As well as the main championships we run an annual International conference for Micromouse-like robots called MINOS. Minos '04 has just taken place. The next event Minos '05 is scheduled for Spring 2005.

We run an electronic mailing list for Micromouse. You can read the list archive and sign up as a list member here.

This web site contains information on the competition's history, technical details of some real mice, the rules of the two competitions that we sponsor, example mazes and links into the world-wide Micromouse community.

If you have a mouse, or are thinking of getting involved in mouse construction then we would really like to hear from you.

Please get in touch with Adrian Johnstone or Wayne Allen if you would like more information.