Imagine, for a minute, that you are standing at the beginning of a long, narrow corridor. You are told that you are at the beginning of a building. Also, you are told the overall floor-size of the building. Your mission, given these two pieces of information, is to find the center of the building. As you begin your quest, you notice that some of the passageways lead to other hallways while some passageways lead to dead ends. You are in a maze. Can you find your way to the center? A MicroMouse can! (Click the mouse and he'll talk to you!)

A MicroMouse is a self-contained, maze solving robot. It uses a microcontroller (small computer) as its "brain," stepper motors as its "legs," and optical sensors as its "eyes." A computer program written in the C or Assembly programming language, is used to define the algorithm (the step by step process) by which the robot finds its way from the starting point in the maze, to the center of the maze. Click here to see the technical data and industry support data for past UML MicroMouse robots.

The MicroMouse Contest

• Every year since the mid 1970's, the IEEE has held a MicroMouse Contest in conjunction with the annual Student Paper Contest. The challenge for each University is to design and build the MicroMouse that can find the center of a maze in the fastest time. The robot must be completely self-contained; it cannot be run by remote control, nor can it have an umbilical cord to receive data or power. A photo of a MicroMouse can be seen in the Virtual Tour.

  Click here to see the Official Rules of the Contest.

  Click here to take a Virtual Tour of the MicroMouse Lab at UMass Lowell

  Click on the maze to play an interactive maze game!

  

UMass Lowell MicroMouse Team Hall of Fame

Senior Engineers for the 1998 MicroMouse project:

• Mike Lam - Electrical Engineer UMass Lowell Class of '98
• Scott Liporto - Electrical Engineer UMass Lowell Class of '98
• Greg Davis - Electrical Engineer UMass Lowell Class of '98
• Antonio Rocha - Electrical Engineer UMass Lowell Class of '98

Senior Engineers for the 1997 MicroMouse project:

• Dave Bennett of Lowell, MA - Electrical Engineering UMass Lowell class of '97
• Daniel Ciarcia Jr. of Tyngsboro, MA - Electrical Engineering UMass, Lowell class of '97

Senior Engineers for the 1996 MicroMouse project:

• Craig Beiferman - Electrical Engineering UMass Lowell class of '96
• Glen Anderson - Electrical Engineering UMass, Lowell class of '96
• Han Vu-Maesto - Electrical Engineering UMass Lowell class of '96

Advisors for the project:

• Professor John Leonard - Department of Electrical Engineering UMass Lowell
• Professor Stephen Spurk - Department of Electrical Engineering UMass Lowell
• Professor Alan Rux - Department of Electrical Engineering UMass Lowell

The MicroMouse Fact Page

Each company below has made a generous donation to our project.
This is our way of saying Thanks.

Microcontroller: 

Motorola 68HC11 8-bit controller with 32K RAM and 32K EPROM.
Programmed in Assembly Language with Buffalo Monitor, and the OverSee programming environment written by Prof. John Leonard.

Sensors: 

• OMRON Advanced Systems, Inc.  Donated the Infrared Sensors used to give our robot sight!

Motors:

Eastern Air Devices (Dover, NH) Donated the Stepper Motors for our robot.

Batteries: 

GP Batteries has supplied the batteries to power our robot.

Maze:

Our maze is built from plywood and dowels according to IEEE rules for a standard maze. It was built by McGuire and Sons of Lowell, MA.

Awards:
        Our first robot ever came in first place in the 1996 Region 1 contest at MIT. The second robot took second place in the 1997 contest at Princeton University.
 
Special Thanks:

Thanks to Glen Bousquet and Dave Rondeau of the Mechanical Engineering Department of UMass Lowell for taking the time to help us with the sensors, bumpers and wheels!

Thanks to the McGuire clan for doing such an excellent job building us a world class maze.