Why does it take so long to set up? It seems like a pegboard (that possibly breaks down into several parts) and a bunch of pegged wall segments would allow one person to set up a 16x16 board in a few minutes.
Well, depends on your definition of "a few minutes". Here is what we did:
There is a company (I forget who) that sells kits of walls and pegs that meet the official Micromouse specifications. Each kit builds a 5x5 maze, good for debugging. With 9 of those, you can build a full maze. The walls meet the precise dimensional specification, wall color (white) and reflectivity (must reflect IR), and have a red stripe on the top (Micromouse allows cameras with a limited field of view to look at wall tops.) The pegs fit in 7mm holes. We got 16 people to buy a total of 18 kits, on the assumption that we could usually round up 9 people when we needed to construct an official maze.
A member identified a material call MDO (medium density overlay, I believe) that is basically an MDF board with a smooth laminate top. It is used for highway signage and such, and can be obtained at the lumber yard by special order. The surface has a smooth finish and takes paint well. A member was put in charge of finding paint that matched the floor specification, flat-black, must absorb IR.
The Techshop was still in business then, so three of us that were members used the Shopbot (CNC router with 4 foot by 8 foot table) to cut panels of the precise dimension required to do a 1/2 of a 5x5 maze, and pocketed a grid of 7mm holes at the correct spacing. Without CNC, it would be impossible to hold the spacing precisely enough, I think. So with two panels and one kit, you can build a 5x5.
It takes 4 to 6 man hours to set up a full 16x16 maze. It requires a flat surface. One thing we are missing is a way to keep all of the edge transitions between panels precisely level. That is a big problem. Our maze simply doesn't cut it for "world class" competitions. Luckily, we usually don't have world-class speed-daemon robots show up, so we can have a referee wearing socks stand in the maze trying to keep the edges from screwing up peoples runs.
Overall an interesting exercise, but the line following maze is much more practical to move around and set up, and gets used far more.
