APEC 2002

March 10-14, 2002
The Adam's Mark Hotel
Dallas, Texas

MicroMouse Contest Results

The sixteenth annual APEC MicroMouse Contest was held at the Adam's Mark Hotel in Dallas, Texas on March 11, 2002. A total of 9 mice were on hand, including 3 teams from outside the United States. Min 3 from Singapore came in first with the best score and the fastest run. Min 2 by the same designer was awarded the second prize. MITEE Mouse 7 from the United States received the third prize. The Best Student Prize went to Hwarang from Korea. All the contestants are listed in the table below.

List of Contestants for APEC '02 MicroMouse Contest

Cash prizes were awarded again this year. Min 3 received US$150 for first place and Hwarang received US$150 for the best student entry.

The contest was held on Monday night after the exposition so that everyone at the conference could attend. To handle the audience of over 150 people, an aerial view of the maze was projected on a large screen behind the judge's table.

Gerardo Molina prepared the maze design once again. APEC has developed a reputation for very difficult maze designs. This year's design had three paths to the center: 83, 86, and 95 squares long respectively. Most mice used the middle path for their best runs. There were fewer diagonals and open squares with no walls on any side, and more long straight sections than in previous years. Though different mice took different paths, the fastest runs of the top five mice were within 1.1 seconds of each other.

The table below contains a list of the scores for each mouse that was able to solve the maze. The score is based on 1/30 of the time used to search the maze prior to the start of each run (maze time), and the time of that run (run time). If the mouse has not crashed or been restarted prior to the start of a run, a bonus of 3 seconds is subtracted from the score.

Scores for All Completed Runs Of Each Mouse

Min 2 and Min 3 were designed and built by Mr. Ng Beng Kiat, a lecturer at Ngee Ann Polytechnic in Singapore. Two of Mr. Kiat's students will be the handlers at the contest. Bay Zi Jing will operate Min 2 and Wong Kok Kiong will operate Min 3. Both mice use 6-volt DC motors and 6-cell Ni-MH Batteries. Min 3 came in 4th at the 22nd All Japan Final held last November.

MITEE Mouse 7 did very poorly at the 22nd All Japan Final last November in Yokohama. The search routine for MITEE 7 is adopted from MITEE 6 and is not optimized for a 4-wheel drive mouse. As a result it took over 7 minutes to search the maze in Japan to find the optimal path. Unfortunately only 7 minutes are allowed for each entrant in the contest so it was never able to make a high speed run. Mr. Otten and his partner Tony Caloggero are staff members at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Hwarang came in third at the 22nd All Japan MicroMouse Contest held in Yokohama last November. Mr. Seung Bum Seo is a student at Hoseo University in Korea.

VI-Mouse is once again representing Vicor Corporation in the APEC MicroMouse competition. VI-Mouse first competed at APEC '01 and successfully navigated the maze for a full 10 minutes without any crashes. VI-Mouse uses two bipolar stepper motors as the "limbs" to navigate in the maze. Twelve infra-red sensors are used to capture the maze information and to ensure reliable navigation. The NEC 78K310A single chip 8-bit microcontroller is the "brain" that collects wall information, and makes movement decisions to explore the maze. VI-Mouse is powered by 18 NiCd rechargeable cells. Mr. Gim Soon Wan participated in the 1999 APEC MicroMouse competition when he was a student of Merrimack College. He has been working as a design engineer at Vicor Corporation for the last 3.5 years.

B&Y was designed by a student from Ngee Ann Polytechnic in Singapore. It uses two 6-volt DC motors. Power is supplied by 6 Ni-MH cells. B&Y uses an NEC 330 processor. Ngee Ann has a program to teach mechatronics to its students through MicroMouse design and construction.

Spunky was designed and built by Myung Jae Sung. He is a student at Chang Il Middle School in Korea. He is 16 years old and may be the youngest contestant to compete at APEC. Spunky almost made it to the center of the very long maze but crashed just one square from the middle.

ADAM was designed and built by Mohammed Basheer. His home address is listed as Kerala India, but he is going to college at the University of Missouri in Rolla. ADAM makes innovative use of part of an optical computer mouse to sense its movement over the floor of the maze.

Smiles was designed and built by students from the State University of New York in Binghamton.

The APEC 2002 MicroMouse Maze

Best Score = 12.35 seconds
Fastest Run = 11.21 seconds