micromouse

Micromouse is an event where small robot mice solve a 16x16 maze. It began in late 1970s, although there is some indication of events in 1950. Events are held worldwide, and are most popular in theUK, U.S., Japan, Singapore, India and South Korea.

The maze is made up of a 16 by 16 grid of cells, each 180 mm square with walls 50 mm high. The mice are completely autonomous robots that must find their way from a predetermined starting position to the central area of the maze unaided. The mouse will need to keep track of where it is, discover walls as it explores, map out the maze and detect when it has reached the goal. Having reached the goal, the mouse will typically perform additional searches of the maze until it has found an optimal route from the start to the center. Once the optimal route has been found, the mouse will run that route in the shortest possible time.

Mice can run at up to three meters per second, with current world records around 6~7 seconds, depending on the maze design.

Mice can use various searching algorithms. Two of the more popular ones are A* and Bellman-based flood-fill searches.

A new version of Micromouse called the Half Size Micromouse has been introduced for the first time for 30th All Japan Micromouse Competition 2009. Instead of a 16 x 16 maze the new competition uses a 32 x 32 maze, but the same square area. Cell and wall dimensions have been reduced, providing a new challenge.

Born Micromouse competition and tournament

Micromouse competition, the autonomous robot autonomous (and not just one's own) and explore the maze is a competition to compete for the shortest time to reach the goal. 
This competition, IEEE 1977 (Electrical and Electronics Engineers) began to be advocated in Japan, 1980 "All Japan Micromouse Competition" is the oldest robotics competition that is held every year. 
All Japan Micromouse Competition is now not only Micromouse competition, robot competitions compete in the speed traces run along the line and compete on speed and competition micro clipper upside down number of cylinders placed in the maze other types have been extensively and has technical problems, robotics event has become a comprehensive Joint Work is also aimed at elementary school as well as competition. 

Since 2007 and the opportunity that was held in Tsukuba, act as a trial large-scale autonomous robot Japan's first (outdoor) that make autonomous 1km to "challenge" Tsukuba held simultaneously, from has begun to challenge the highly technical issues. 

Micromouse Competition is the heart of competition, others are held in each district as a district conference in Japan, and the micro-mouse competition is open to students sponsored by the Japan Student, the U.S., Korea, Taiwan and Singapore are held overseas. In recent years, technology has achieved significant progress, such as Korea, Singapore and overseas tax has been growing international competition as the championship unfolds usual intense.

If you have that you can move yourself all the functions necessary for autonomous operation =selfcontained 
Able to act autonomously without any external handling such self = autonomouse