5 HN users recommended this documentary4 months2023–2024score 4
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN commenters point to it as a nice introduction to micromouse and maze-racing robots.
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.
“is a nice introduction to the competition and its technical history.” (HN, 2024)
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]
More details on maze racing robots and fans for traction.
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.
Micromouse breakthrough via fan sucking air from under the car.
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]
Fans and ground effect let micromice do 6g turns while solving mazes.
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