Behaveior model simulations of micromouse and its application in intelligent mobile robot education

The increasing popularity of robots in people´s daily life has made those implementation skills a necessity for electrical and electronic engineering students, especially for those who are in the technology oriented universities in Taiwan. To help these students quickly learn and acquire the knowledge with persistent interest, the contest oriented project for micromouse and its corresponding MATLAB/SIMULINK behavior simulations are used in this paper. The main topics for the simulations include 1) diagonal maze-solving and path planning algorithms, and 2) the dynamics and digital motion control techniques of differential drive mobile robots. It is seen that the graphical user interface development environment (GUIDE) and behavior model simulations not only help ease the design and visualization of maze-solving and path planning algorithms, but also help fine tune the control parameters of digital motion feedback controllers.