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 UK Micromouse?

UK 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.

The UK Micromouse National Championships

In the UK the national micromouse competition had been run under the auspices of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) for some years. The Computer Science department at Royal Holloway took over the hosting of the national Micromouse championships in the years 2000-2003, and in 2004 the event moved to Birmingham, and is now hosted by the Faculty of Technology, Engineering and the Environment, Birmingham City University. The UK micromouse competition is now one of the many events of the Birmingham TechFest.

  www.bcu.ac.uk/techfest.

Getting a fully working mouse prepared for competition is a daunting task, so there is a simpler 'wall follower' class which uses the same full sized maze, but with a guaranteed left hand connected path from start to the centre 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.

The competition rules can be found at:

www.bcu.ac.uk/techfest or www.micromouseonline.com

Annual Conference

As well as the main championships we run an annual International conference for Micromouse-like robots called MINOS. Minos '12 has just taken place. The next event, Minos'13 is scheduled for Spring 2013.

Email List

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

This web site contains information on the competition's history at RHUL, and technical details of some real mice, example mazes and links into the world-wide Micromouse community. Rules may have changed slightly, therefore please visit www.bcu.ac.uk/techfest for the latest rules.

An Invitation

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 if you would like more information, and make sure you visit www.micromouseonline.com