
Min7 micromouse robot solves maze in 3.921 seconds - ukdm
http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/min7-micromouse-robot-solves-maze-in-3-921-seconds-20111122/
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ColinWright

      > [The exploration phase is] slower, it's
      > still impressively fast considering there's
      > only a 20MHz processor running inside
    

That's what people think, but the processing is trivial. The hard parts are
the mechanical grip and the control theory that lets you know exactly where
you are, where you're pointed, and how fast you're going. My experience of
building and running one of these things is that computing the exploration,
solving the maze, and computing the fastest path (which isn't always the
shortest[1]), is all a complete doddle compared with coping with wheel slip,
bumps in the surface, and precise control of the speeds of the wheels.
Granted, my mouse never ran at that speed, but I had an 8 bit 4MHz processor
and it was mostly idle.

[1] A longer route can be faster if it has fewer corners. I was at the
competition where a mouse first ran a diagonal, and thereafter the designs of
all the mazes changed to account for this.

