UH Manoa College of Engineering Teams Rank High in Micromouse Competition

Four teams representing the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa College of Engineering were ranked in the top ten at the annual Region 6 Micromouse Competition held at Cal State University Chico. The competition had a total of 20 teams entered and also had teams from Cal State University Chico, Cal State University Sacramento, San Francisco State University, University of California Davis, and the University of Nevada at Reno.

"I am proud of how well all of our teams did, not only in the competition, but in the engineering process that went into designing and building the mice that went into the competition," said Tep Dobry, interim assistant dean of the College of Engineering. "Three of our teams were all students participating in Micromouse for the first time. The more ʻexperienced‘ teams were in their second year of competition."

"Wild Mouse" from Cal State University Chico earned 1st place when it found the center of the maze within 20 seconds. UH Mānoa's mouse, "DeathStar" earned 2nd place by finding the center in 54 seconds. UH Mānoa‘s "Jane" earned 4th place by finding the center in 70 seconds.

Micromouse is a fully autonomous robot designed to navigate and solve an arbitrary maze. The mice are generally designed with two or four wheels as their primary form of location. The mice are placed in a square maze measuring 16 x 16 and are given ten minutes to find the center. The mouse that finds the center wins, but if more than one finds the center, the mouse with the fastest time to find the center wins. Each year across the nation and the world, students build better mice to compete with other institutions.

The competition was sponsored by the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and the UH Mānoa teams were sponsored by the College of Engineering, The Ronald N. S. Ho Fund, and the IEEE.