Micromouse for me started as a plain & simple curiosity during my second year of engineering which soon turned into a full blown no-time-for-anything-else activity. During the very early stages of development I realized that I’ll be needing a handy micromouse simulator to test my maze solving algorithms as arranging a full sized 16×16 mircomouse maze would have been impossible and impractical. Apart from that, running the algorithms on PC would have given me the flexibility to use the debug functionality offered by the Turbo C environment. Programs are rarely written 100% correct in the first go and hence, almost always require debugging of some sort.

Luckily, around the same time I came in touch with this brilliant freshman, Manish Sharma. His enthusiasm for micromouse was astounding and his ideas refreshing. He was the one who first came up with the architecture of algorithm simulator. In a few days time he developed a header file which contained the required graphical and mouse locomotion function calls. Later, I successfully implemented the modified flood fill algorithm. I would like to thank Manish for designing the basic architecture of the simulator. The algorithm used in the simulator is effectively a generic path finding and path planning tool which can be modified to solve a given unknown maze of any dimension.

After completing my third year, I got my internship at TRI Technosolutions Pvt Ltd @ IIT Bombay. There I got an opportunity to write an article on the micromouse algorithm and simulation. The article that I wrote for them can be downloaded from the link given below including all the software files. You can also view the article on the ‘Resources’ section of TRI’s website,

http://www.thinklabs.in/resources/?cat=13

It has been brought to my notice that the above link is not functioning, TRI guys are probably upgrading their website it seems. You can download the complete article with source code of the simulator from HERE.