Micromouse Robot

I made micromouse robot for my final project. I made this because I was so excited when I first saw this robot. This is the micromouse that make me excited. This micromouse is named Tetra and made by Kato-san. The size is even smaller compared to Tamiya mini 4 WD.

I was playing mini 4 WD when I was elementary school. Tamiya can run fast and turn in the track as it has rollers. When I first saw micromouse, there is a question came to my head. Why and how micromouse can run fast without touching the wall and can also navigate the maze to reach center of the maze? I even ever think that micromouse is controlled by a remote control, but that’s not true. The fact is micromouse has an algorithm to solve the maze. I was so excited to figure out how to make my micromouse, so I make micromouse robot for my final project. This is my micromouse.

Mechanical:

My micromouse used DFRobot miniQ robot chassis and 2 miniQ robot chassis encoder. The diameter of chassis is 122mm.

Electronics:
For the microcontroller I choose AVR ATmega644PA, because this series have pin change interrupt feature that I needed for read 2 chassis encoder in quadrature mode. The motor driver IC is L293D. For the sensor I use cheap IR LED and photodiode. My micromouse is only have 3 sensors for detect right, left, and front wall.  

I design that PCB for microcontroller, sensor, and LCD using Eagle PCB software. The PCB is dual layer.

Firmware:

For the algorithm, I decided to use Flood Fill algorithm. Before I am implementing this algorithm, I made the simulation on the PC by using .NET C# application. The function if this simulator is to make sure that the Flood Fill algorithm is working before implement it on the robot. The maze size is 5x5.