Seniors complete mighty MicroMouse Project

by Dennis Olson
Daily Titan

Electrical Engineering students' robot breaks day before competition.
Thursday, December 9, 2004

As finals week quickly approaches and the stressis relieved with each passing grade, most students can finally look back with a sense of accomplishment for making it through another grueling semester. For a group of electrical engineering students presenting their senior design projects on Wednesday, the feeling was no different.

The day for Chris Tuason, Sam Rokni, Peter Kral and Tian-Hwa Yang to present their completed MicroMouse project to their Engineering 485 class.

The MicroMouse is a complicated project designed on a computer program using a virtual maze and tweaked so a mouse would be able to sense where the walls were present and be able to complete the maze.

Once the computer program was finished it was applied using a real maze and a battery-operated mouse programmed to sense the same walls and complete the maze.

While the finished product didn't perform exactly how they had planned, the four architects of the MicroMouse Project said they couldn't help but feel a sense of relief once the presentation finished.

"It feels great to be finished," Kral said. "This was the most complicated project we've done."

The construction of the MicroMouse took three months and the conception of it took longer.

"It's tough to gauge how long we have [really] been working on it because we all dream electronics," Kral said.

The MicroMouse idea is not a new one. The original MicroMouse project at Cal State Fullerton happened in 1990. that version was three times as big, which allowed it to have greater capability and required a much bigger maze than the current edition.

CSUF isn't alone when it comes to an interest in projects like these either. There are yearly MicroMouse competitions where schools throughout California compete to see whose mouse is best.

This team fell short in its only competition.

"We didn't do well because the mouse broke the night before,"Tuason said. "With a better mouse we would have done well."

Whatever the outcome of their next competition, the students are intent on improving their MicroMouse.

"I am eager for the next time," Rokni siad. "We are going to have a newer mouse and a new processor."

Even with hope for better results in the future, Yang said he looks back on this MicroMouse project as a positive one.