The Fastest Maze-Solving Competition On Earth
Veritasium5 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2023–2024
documentary · general · evergreen · 2023–2024 on HN
Veritasium visits the Micromouse competition, where small autonomous robots race to solve mazes at extreme speed. It covers the competition's technical history, including fans and ground effect enabling very high-g turns.
HN commenters point to it as a nice introduction to micromouse and maze-racing robots.
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5 comments from Hacker News
[1] "The Fastest Maze-Solving Competition On Earth" (22 min) is a nice introduction to the competition and its technical history. [1] ▶ this video
A few months ago, I saw this documentary about maze-solving robots that really impressed me: ▶ this video This might be an interesting use case.
For me it was the Veritasium Micromouse video[0]. Hard to quote the video but from wikipedia[1]:"Micromice are among the highest-performing autonomous robots." Things like fans and ground effect being used to make these devices do 6g turns while mapping and solving a maze. Alternately, the world of quadcopters, face recognition (body warmth recognition required?), lidar will make for a terrifying battlefield. [0] ▶ this video [1] link
Veritasium did a video on Micromouse competition which also got the breakthrough via similar kind of technology (fan that sucks air from under the car) - ▶ this video Interesting watch.
Cars designed for high speed will have a significant advantage over a motorcycle through capturing down forces to dramatically increase the amount of friction between the tires and the surface before losing grip and spinning out. Motorcycles can own the power to weight ratio category, but they can't use all that power because at that point the wheels just spin. I found it super interesting when I learned that one of the biggest advances in maze solving races is that someone ended up putting a fan in their little "mouse" to push down so the wheels could get more traction. link More details on maze racing from Veritasium: ▶ this video