MicroMouse competition

This year we are organizing a MicroMouse competition! In teams of 1 to 3 people, your goal is to build a robot that can solve a maze as fast as possible.

About the competition

MicroMouse is a well-known worldwide robotics competition started in the 1970s. There are multiple events held each year in countries such as the UK or Japan, and now also at the RSA in the Netherlands! The goal of the competition is to create a fully autonomous robot that can solve a 16x16 maze in the shortest time.

What we provide

We will give workshops throughout the year to help you build your robot, and work sessions where you can get help from experienced RSA members. We also provide you with basic templates that can give you a working robot, so if you have less time or experience in a certain area you can improve the template design instead of designing your robot from scratch. You can also test your robots on the practice maze whenever you want.

We do not provide you with most components (except for small components such as resistors), so your team will have to buy those. The components necessary for a good MicroMouse robot will generally cost around 60€ (though you can spend more on expensive components if you want to use those). There is a soft spending limit of 150€ per team.

Rules

At the competition day, you have 10 minutes with the maze. During this time you may attempt as many runs as you want, and the run with the shortest time from the starting square (in one of the corners of the maze) to the centre square will count. Your robot cannot have any information about the maze before your 10 minutes start, but during that time it may remember information between runs. This means that you can have some time to explore the maze, and when the robot has found the shortest path you can have many attempts to get the fastest possible time.

You are free to use the components that you want in your robot, provided that your robot meets certain rules, such as fitting within the dimensions (15cm x 15cm).

You can find the detailed rules here.

Signing up

The competition is open to everyone!
You can also join the RSA to participate in our other events and workshops! Membership costs 30€ per year per person, for which you get access to all events and workshops.

Participation for non-RSA members costs 10€ per person, which gives you access to the competition and all of the workshops! The launch event and first workshop are free, so that you can see if you want to participate.

We organized the first official edition of the MicroMouse competition this year! The competition was funded through money from the fast grant and a sponsorship from Tinytronics.

Femtofant again was victorious, with a very impressive time of 18. 046 seconds.

The 2025 MicroMouse teams and the 2025 maze

The mice created by the teams for the 2025 competition

We organized an internal first run of the MicroMouse competition this year!

The winning team was femtofant, with a time of 34.514 seconds.

The 2024 winning MicroMouse team (femtofant, left) with the organizing committee (HackCo, right) and the 2024 maze