Bro. What is this A Tellon Dudes I Don't get it. This tiny robot Mouse can finish this maze in just six seconds. Every year around the world people compete.

oldest robotics race. The goal is simple. Get to the end of the maze as fast as possible. Person who came second lost by 20 milliseconds, but competition has grown fierce.

When somebody saw my design, they said, you're crazy Why is there so much tension? What's riding on that? Want know? Hna, Hna This video was sponsored by Onshape in 1952. Mathmatician Claude Shannon constructed an electronic mouse named Theus that could solve a maze. The trick to making the mouse intelligent was hidden in a computer built into the maze itself made of telephone relay switches the mouse was just a magnet on Wheels essentially following an electromagnet controlled by the position of the relay switches. He is now exploring the maze using a rather involved strategy of trial and error.

As he finds the correct path, he registers the information in his memory. later. I Can put him down in any part of the maze that he's already explored and he'll be able to go directly to the goal without making a single false turn. Thesias is often referred to as one of the first examples of machine learning.

A director at Google recently said that it inspired the whole field of. AI 25 years later, editors at The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers or I E for electronic mice or L Mouse Electroni as they had heard they were ecstatic. Were these the successors to Thesias? but something had been Lost in Translation these mice were just batteries and cases, not robots capable of intelligent Behavior But the misunderstanding stuck with them and they wondered why couldn't we hold that competition ourselves in 1977? The announcement for it E's amazing Micr Mouse Maze contest attracted over 6,000 entrance, but the number of successful competitors dwindled rapidly. Eventually, just 15 entrance reached the finals in 1979, but by this point the contest had garnered enough public interest to be broadcast Nationwide on the Evening News.

And just like the rumor that inspired the competition, Micromouse began to spread across the world. Mic: What Done Chat the micro Mouse Micro Mouse Even people in the top two or three you can see them trying to set their mice up and they they can barely find the buttons to press because it's absolutely nerve-wracking It doesn't matter what it was, it could be horse racing. It could be Motor Racing It could be Mouse Racing Got: If you have a shred of competitiveness in it, you want to win right? Just like a real Mouse A micro Mouse has to be fully autonomous. No internet connection no GPS or remote control and no nudging it to help it get unstuck.

It has to fit all its Computing Motors sensors and power supply in a frame no longer or wider than 25 cm. There isn't a limit on the height of the mouse, but the rules don't allow climbing, flight, or any forms of combustion. so rocket propulsion, for example, is out of the equation. The maze itself is a square about 3 m on each side, subdivided by walls into corridors only 18 cm across.

And in 2009, the half-size micromouse category was introduced with mice smaller than 12 1/2 cm per side and pass one minut. The final layout of the maze is only revealed at the start of each competition, after which competitors are not allowed to change the code in their mice. The big three competitions all Japan, Taiwan and USA's Apec usually limit the time mice get in the Maze to 7 or 10 minutes and mice are only allowed five runs from the start to the goal. So if you spend a lot of time searching, that's a penalty.

makes sense. So the strategy for most microm mise is to spend their first run carefully learning the Maze and looking for the best path to the goal while not wasting too much time. Then they use their remaining tries to Sprint down that path for the fastest runtime. possible.

Solving a maze may sound simple enough, though it's important to remember that with only a few infrared sensors for eyes, the view from inside the maze is a lot less clear than what we see from above. Still, you can solve a maze with your eyes closed. if you just put one hand along one wall. you will eventually reach the end of most common mazes and that's exactly what some initial micromouse competitors realized too.

And after a simple wall following Mouse took home gold in the first. Finals the goal of the maze was moved away from the edges and freestanding walls were added, which would leave a simple wall following. Mouse Searching for, maybe probably not your next Instinct might be to run through the maze, taking note of every fork in the road. Whenever you reach a dead end or a loop, you can go back to the last intersection and try a different path.

If your last left turn got you nowhere, you'd come back to that intersection and go instead. You can think of this strategy as the one a headstrong Mouse might use running as deep into the maze as it can and turning back only when it can't go any further. This search strategy known as Depth First search will eventually get the mouse to the goal. The problem is, it might not be the shortest route because the mouse only turns back when it needs to, so it may have missed a shortcut that it never tried.

Finally Holy The Sibling to this search algorithm. Breet First search would find the shortest path. With this strategy, the Mouse runs down one branch of an intersection until it reaches the next one. Then it goes back to check the path it skipped before moving on to the next layer of intersections.

So the mouse checks every option it reaches, But all that backtracking means that it's rerunning paths dozens of times. At this point, even searching the whole maze often takes less time. so why not just do that? A meticulous Mouse could search all 256 cells of the maze, testing every turn and corner to sure it has definitely found the shortest path, but searching so thoroughly isn't necessary either. Instead, the most popular micromouse strategy is different from all of these techniques.

It's a search algorithm known as floodfill. This Mouse's plan is to make optimistic Journeys through the maze so optimistic in fact, that on their first journey, their map of the maze doesn't have any walls at all. They simply draw the shortest path to the goal and go. When when their optimistic plan inevitably hits a wall that wasn't on their map, they simply mark it down and update their new shortest path to the goal s Running, updating, running, updating, always beining for the goal under the hood of the algorithm.

What the micro Mouse is marking on their map is the distance from every Square in the Maze to the goal to travel. optimistically. the mouse follows the trail of decreasing numbers down to zero. Whenever they hit a wall, they update the numbers on their map to reflect the new shortest distance to the goal.

This strategy of following the numerical path of least resistance gives the Floodfill algorithm its name. The process resembles flooding the maze with water and updating values based on the flow. Oh, once the mouse reaches the goal, it can I thought it was graph Theory smooth out the path it took and get a solution to the maze. However, it may look back and imagine an even shorter Uncharted path it could have taken.

The mouse might not be satisfied that it's found the shortest path just yet. While this algorithm isn't guaranteed to find the best path on first pass, it takes advantage of the fact that micromouse need to return to the start to begin their next run. So if the mouse treats its return as a New Journey it can use the return trip to search the maze as well. between these two attempts, both optimized to find the shortest path from start to finish, it's extremely likely that the mouse will Discover it and the mouse will have done it efficiently, often leaving relevant areas of the maze entirely untouched.

Floodfill offers both an intelligent and practical way for Micr mise to find the shortest path through the maze. Once there was a clear strategy to find the shortest path and once the microcontrollers and sensors required to implement it became common some people believe CH Why don't they have um, a mouse with a little a little jumper and it jumps in the air in a very very vertical way and it looks above and I was like and it lands and then it boom. And once the mic and sensors required to implement it became common. Some people believed Micromouse had run its course.

As a paper published in I E Put it at the end of the 1980s, Micromouse Contest had outlived itself. The problem was solved and did not provide any new challenges. If you watch a video, you would notice not them. IDE Bro Okay, okay, got in the 2017 Jaan Micromouse competition.

Both the bronze and silver placing Mice found the shortest path to the goal and once they did, they were able to zip along it as quick as 7.4 seconds. But Mazak Kazu Utsa's winning Mouse Red Comet did something entirely different. This is the shortest path to the goal, the one that everyone took. This is the path that Red Comet took.

It's a full five and A2 M longer. That's because micro mice aren't actually searching for the shortest path. they're searching for the fastest path and Red Comets search Al Figured out that this path had fewer turns to slow it, so even though the path was longer, it could end up being faster. So it took that risk.

Wa, that's insane. By 131 milliseconds, differing routs at competition are now more common than not, and even just getting to the goal remains difficult. Whether due to a mysterious algorithm or a quirk of the physical maze corner, it's a little bit like micro mice don't always behave as you'd expect. Well, this is like a new glitch to be honest, so that that sound like a really rookie glitch.

Micr Mouse is far from solved A code, not just a software problem or a hardware problem. It's both. It's a robotics problem. Red Comet didn't win because it had a better search algorithm or because it had faster motors.

Its cleverness came from how the brains and body of the mouse interacted together. It turns out, salving the maze is not the problem, right? It never was the problem right, But it's actually about navigation and it's about going fast. Every year the the robots get smaller, faster, lighter. There is still plenty plenty of innovation left, and there's a small group of uh, devotees in Japan busy building quarter siiz.

Micromouse, which would sit on a quarter two nearly 50 years on Micromouse is bigger than ever. Competitions have appeared solved at first glance Before the high jump was an Olympic sport since 1896, with competitors refining their jumps using variations like the Scissor, the Western Roll, and the Straddle. Over the decades with diminishing returns, but once foam padding became standard in competition, Dick Fosbury rewrote the sport in 1968 by becoming the first Olympian to jump over the pole backwards. Now, almost every high jumper does what's known as The Fosbury Flop If Micromouse had indeed stopped in the 1980s, the competition would have missed its own Fosbury flops.

Two innovations that completely changed how Microm mise ran. After all, a lot can change in a sport where competitors can solder on any upgrade they can imagine the first earliest Innovations in Micromouse and had nothing to do with technology. It was simply a way of thinking outside the box or rather cutting through the box every Mouse used to turn Corners like this, but everything changed with the mouse. Mighty 3 The Mighty Mouse 3 implemented diagonals for the first time and that turned out to be a much better idea that we really thought.

And because it's cool, you know maze designers often put diagonals in to the maze now. So uh, you know you could end up with a maze where it never comes up, but most of the time it's benefit. What if the maze meta is just dog and they start putting circles and whatnot like an Inception In order to pull off diagonals, the chassis of the mouse had to be reduced to less than 11 cm wide or just 5 cm for half Siiz micro. Mouse The sensors and software of the mouse had to change too.

When you're running between parallel walls, all you have to do is maintain an equal distance between your left and right infrared readings, but a diagonal requires an entirely new algorithm, one that essentially guides the mouse as if it had blinders on. Normally, if you're going along the side of a wall or something like that, you know most of the time you can see the wall all the time and so that helps you to to guide yourself and and you know when you're getting off. But in the diagonal situation, you just see these walls coming at you. and if you Veer even a tiny bit off course snagging a corner is a lot less forgiving than sliding against Are still crashes in competition today, but in exchange a jagged path of turns transforms into one narrow straightaway.

These days, nearly every competitive micromouse is designed to take this risk. Cutting diagonals opened up room for even more ideas. Around the same time, mice were applying similar strategies to Turning. Instead of stopping and pivoting through two right turns, a mouse could sweep around in a single U-turn motion and once the possibility of diagonals were added, the total number of possible turns opened up exponentially.

The maze was no longer just a grid of square hallways with so many more options to weigh, figuring out the best path became more complex than ever, But the payoff was dramatic. What was once a series of stops and start Arts could now be a single fluid snaking motion. How microm mice imagined and moved through the maze had changed. Completely available technology.

Yeah, Apex Corner Driving yeah then then you can put stuff like yeah yeah makes sense Was getting upgrades over the years I To say and my brain off unwieldy arms that were used to find walls were replaced by a smaller array of infrared sensors on board. The mouse precise stepper Motors were traded in for continuous DC Motor ja CH You know cars, they have to turn certain ways or whatever I think those accelerate so fast and maintain speed. Isn't it like Str That could use to like have racing lines that only apply for this small scale vehicle that's very light or whatever I think coders I Feel like the DC motors give you more power to play its own set of rules so we were interested in doing that. So then you have to have a a Servo You have to actually have feedback on the motor to make it do the right thing.

Gyroscopes added an extra sense of orientation. It's like a compass. Absolutely. we had this thing with you.

They came about because of mobile phones, really. So the technology provides people with things which weren't there before. All of the Turning is done based off the gyro rather than counting pulses off the wheels because it's much more reliable. But even with all the mechanical upgrades, the biggest physical issue for Microm mise went unaddressed for decades.

One thing you'll see almost every is a roll of tape. Once you know to look for it, see it everywhere. This tape isn't for repairs or reattaching. Fallen remes the dust on the wheels, specs of dust off the wheels in between rounds.

chat In skateboarding, we do the same thing if you go to the actual good skate parks on the walls, there's like, um, a bunch of like, like H fake grass or whatever and you go like that cuz D can kill you. Speed and precision. These robots are operating. That tiny change in friction is enough to ruin a run.

If you want to turn while driving fast, you need centripetal force to accelerate you into the turn. And the faster you're moving, the more Force you need to keep you on the track. The only centripetal force for a car turning on flat ground is friction, which is determined by two things: the road pushing up the weight of the car or the normal force multiplied by the static coefficient of friction, which is the friction of the interface between the tire and road surface. This is why RAC Trcks have banked turns.

The Steep angles help cars turn with less. FR it push into part of normal force itself. Now points in to contribute to the centripetal force required. If the bank turn is steep enough, cars can actually make the turn without any friction at all.

The inward component of the normal force alone is enough to provide the cental force required to stay on track. Microm mice are no different and they don't have Bank turns to help as they got faster and faster by the early 20 thousands. Their limiting factor was no longer speed, but control of that speed. They had to set their center of gravity low and slow down during turns to avoid slipping into a wall or flipping over.

But unlike race cars, there wasn't anything in the rules to stop micromouse competitors from solving this problem by engineering an entirely new mechanism. Chap Chap Want to be more balanced for everybody that the surface is always clean the same way and then every time there's a run, they remove the entire bottom of the the whole thing. they slide it off, put a new one while the other one is getting cleaned, remove the entire bottom plate and put a new one every time. Micro Mouse's It's unfair.

Almost considered a gimmick when the Mouse M08 first used it in competition. You might be staring at the video to try to see it, but you won't. Instead, it's something you'll hear that isn't the mouse ding its engines. it's spinning up a propeller and while flying over the walls is against the rules.

There's nothing in the rules against a mouse vacuuming itself to the ground to prevent slipping. Daveon was, well. it was pretty smart put a fan on a mouse, but he used a ducted fan and I think he was really looking at kind of reaction force you know, blowing the thing down. He had a skirt around, but it was not terribly effective.

Forgive me for saying so. The idea is to let as little air in as possible and like your vacuum cleaner when you block your vacuum cleaner. right, the motor unloads and speeds up and so the current drops. But if you let too much air in, the current's very high and these are just quadcopter, Motors and they draw a lot of current at the scale of micromouse.

A vacuum fan often just built from handheld drone Parts is enough to generate a downward Force five times the mouse's weight. Wow, Okay, H that's impressive. So how much does the car actually weigh? about 130? G Uh, and if you listen I don't know if you'll get it on your microphone, but oh yeah, you hear the the that's what I was saying earlier chat about. It has its own set of rules with the physics.

It can do ridiculous slow down, loads up with that much friction. Micro mice today can turn Corners with a centripetal acceleration approaching 6GS That's the same as F1 cars. Yep, a should be able to go up down once. nearly everyone equipped fans.

The added control allowed Builders to push the speed limit on Micromite when it's allowed to, it will out accelerate a Tesla Roadster but not for very far and they can zip along at up to 7 m/s faster than most people can run in theory. Yes, in reality. No, what does that? How does that make any sense in theory? Yes in I Just know. Like, what does that mean that physics work on paper? Physics work don't work in real life.

Every one of the features now standard on the modern micromouse was once an experiment and the next Fosbury Flop might not be far off. The first four-wheeled micromouse to win the all Japan competition did so in 1988, but it would take another 22 years of the winning Mouse growing and losing appendages before Four-wheel M became the norm. With micro mice still experimenting in six and eight wheel designs, omnidirectional and even computer vision. Who knows what the next paradigm shift will be? Your time on the maze actually begins only when you leave the start.

Hey yo! But if you want to get started with Micr mouse, you don't need to worry about wheel counts, vacuum fans, or even diagonal wait. Wait, in that case, then the best. I'm telling you right now I'm tell I'll tell you right now, the best mice possible is a catapult. Yeah, if you're listening to this, okay, you want easy, make a catapult at the start.

Has a camera on a catapult. It's let. let the start. It can't fly.

Okay, it jumps up on the wire, then Bing goes back down and as it starts right, it cuts the cargo off and leaves the camera behind it because it's too much weight. Why carry this around if we just leave it behind it? Boom. So Bing e start then Bing detachable cargo. Wow.

But if you want to get started with Micr mouse, you don't need to worry about wheel count or vacuum fans or even diagonals. It is to my mind the perfect combination of all the major disciplines that you need for Robotics and engineering and programming embedded systems all wrapped up in one accessible bundle that you can do in your living room and you don't need a chat. I Don't be R Chat. Do it looks like it.

He'd be a annoying an argument. Dude, this this looks jaded as yep that will never work your your your mess is a piece of dog like dude. You come along because you're curious and then you think I could do that? that doesn't look so hard and then you're doomed. Really if it sucks you in it, uh, it turns into quite the journey.

for at its core. Microm Mouse is just about a mouse trying to solve a maze though nearly 50 years later, it's a simple problem that's a good reminder. there is no such thing as a simple problem. Tell us Pris for that Chat Chat Hold Up Chat.

Hear me out. Hear me out. When you guys said no flight, you guys talk. You talk about the the actual the actual mice itself right? Watch this.

Bing Bing bing bing. Okay, this is the mice. Okay, this the mice. Okay, It starts like that with a super catapult like this.

Okay and in it it's got a little camera little ball and they calculate a away that when the ball goes up it'll have a bird's eye view like that right? So then it starts and was this a L Wash this chat, Watch it. It starts. The camera has an angle it it scans the entire maze. a snapshot boom instantly and even at the beginning when it starts it doesn't matter.

The car already goes forward as it's taking the picture. Once it has the right path right, as soon as it sit launch in the air, the mechanism latches off and this entire part detaches and it leaves it behind. No radio signal. Okay then put a wire, put a CO a cog wheel a put some wiring on it and when the camera goes in the air it's chase the wires behind it and then as soon as it's over cut off the entirety of the of the of the of the thing and then boom ch Think about it.

think about it. it's kind of smart CH that could work right? Why not All right? Whatever bro whatever bro actually smart idea let me that yo this is X x on the be yo okay my voice as well that is anyone knows that boy I don't know, he's just so s anyone knows that boy I don't know he's just so sry.