Junior Boy (2001)

The rather interesting name of Junior Boy was the idea of Justin Loy. It began as working name, and it stuck. It was kind of fitting, too, since our mouse wasn't that smart and gained a lot of weight in the design process. (No offense to anyone who is actually called Junior Boy, especially if you're Samoan.)

Junior Boy

Junior Boy's chassis was the result of hard work by Elliot Taniguchi and Mike Tamamoto. Unfortunately, when we tried to get Junior Boy moving, he spun his wheels uselessly. Our weight distribution was not very good, so we didn't have enough traction at the drive wheels. This problem was solved (although not very well, nor very eloquently) by adding melted lead fishing weights to the chassis to weigh it down and improve traction. However, Junior Boy still vibrates a little when starting from a dead stop.

Note the big block of lead at the rear.

I (Aaron Ohta) built Junior Boy's sensor board. It worked pretty good, except I think it probably gave wrong sensor readings at the competition, causing us to get stuck in an infinite software loop. Oh well. This board was also victim of an unfortunate accident: Junior Boy got dropped off a table and cracked the sensor board. Luckily, Junior Boy was strong enough to survive this sabotage attempt, and the sensor board was repaired.

I also painted the wheels to make it look like rims. Since my car is too crappy to soup-up, I might as well trick out our Micromouse.

This is a close-up of Junior Boy's motor driver/power board, which I also built. (This is the second version of the board - the first time I built it, I won the UH Micromouse stupidity award by soldering all the transistors in backwards.)

Justin was the head software guy of our team. He wrote most of the tracking code and all of the solving code. Our mouse wasn't that smart (hence the name), since it used a relatively simple solving algorithm. It was based upon 4 rules, which allowed to to find the center most of the time, but not all of the time. Justin did have a more advanced algorithm in the works; however, he only finished coding it at about 3 a.m. on the competition day. Then, when we tested it, Junior Boy turned around 180 degrees - in the start square! Scratch that code.
Mike helped Justin with a significant amount of the programming. He also debugged and revised much of Justin's original tracking code.
I wrote the turning code, which is probably why our mouse crashed on turns so much. :P

This mouse took fourth place (out of twelve, I think) at the IEEE Region 6 Micromouse competition, held on May 5th, 2001, at California State University at Sacramento.