The Fastest Maze-Solving Competition On Earth
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters point to it as a nice introduction to micromouse and maze-racing robots.
What it is
Veritasium visits the Micromouse competition, where small autonomous robots race to solve mazes at extreme speed. It covers the competition's technical history, including fans and ground effect enabling very high-g turns.
Recommended by 5 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2023 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends tstrimple · 2023-09 · on “New world record with an electric racing car: From 0 to 100 in 0.956 seconds”
Cars designed for high speed will have a significant advantage over a motorcycle through capturing down forces to dramatically increase the amount of friction between the tires and the surface before losing grip and spinning out. Motorcycles can own the power to weight ratio category, but they can't use all that power because at that point the wheels just spin. I found it super interesting when I learned that one of the biggest advances in maze solving races is that someone ended up putting a fan in their little "mouse" to push down so the wheels could get more traction. [LINK] More details on maze racing from Veritasium: [this video]
Recommends v512 · 2023-10 · on “0 To 100 kph in 1 second”
Veritasium did a video on Micromouse competition which also got the breakthrough via similar kind of technology (fan that sucks air from under the car) - [this video] Interesting watch.
Recommends _carbyau_ · 2024-06 · on “Mitsubishi robot solves Rubik's Cube in 0.305s”
For me it was the Veritasium Micromouse video[0]. Hard to quote the video but from wikipedia[1]:"Micromice are among the highest-performing autonomous robots." Things like fans and ground effect being used to make these devices do 6g turns while mapping and solving a maze. Alternately, the world of quadcopters, face recognition (body warmth recognition required?), lidar will make for a terrifying battlefield. [0] [this video] [1] [LINK]
Recommends sllabres · 2024-07 · on “Physicists have created the most fiendishly difficult maze”
[1] "The Fastest Maze-Solving Competition On Earth" (22 min) is a nice introduction to the competition and its technical history. [1] [this video]
Recommends kromnomo · 2024-07 · on “Ask HN: Best way to learn robotics with a 10 year old?”
A few months ago, I saw this documentary about maze-solving robots that really impressed me: [this video] This might be an interesting use case.