Overview

A MicroMouse is a miniture robot controlled by a microcontroller that finds its way through an arbitrary maze. It races against other mice, to see which can solve the maze fastest.

Each MicroMouse must meet certain specifications, and follow all the rules, to complete in the numerous competitions each year.

During my final year at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), I was involved in enhancing a previous micromouse design, and creating a new mouse based on different technology. QUTEE and QUTEE II are both built completely from scratch, and provide different methods of maze solving and hardware design specifications.

The original mouse QUTEE, consists of a Z80 microcontroller, 32K of RAM, 32K of EPROM, 10 IR detectors, and 2 servo motors set in a differential configuration.

The next generation QUTEE II, provides a Motorola 68HC11 microcontroller, various chip and logic surface mount devices, high quality servo motors.

These are the various pictures that I snapped during the project. The size difference between the two mice was the main advantage. You will note that the sensor board for QUTEE II was not yet complete at the time of these photos.