MicroMouse Simulator

Bucknell MARC's OpenGL/FreeGLUT MicroMouse maze simulator.

Purpose

The purpose of this project is to build a simulator for the MicroMouse challenge while maximizing code reuse. The idea is the maze solving logic will be implemented in an abstract class that gets inherited by both the VirtualRobot and real-world implementation classes so the physical solving code can be directly shared.

Mapping The Maze

The MazeMap structure holds the robot's view of what the maze looks like in memory. There are two dimensional arrays containing information about whether or not a wall is in the way (also whether or not the robot knows it has scanned that location.

Simple API provides access to these confusing multi-dimensinal horizontalWalls and vertcalWalls arrays.

BOOL mm_is_wall(MazeMap* mazeMap, Point pos, Direction direction);
void mm_set_wall(MazeMap* mazeMap, BOOL state, Point pos, Direction direction);

These funcitondeal with the challenge of handling differentiation between vertical, horizontal walls, and how direction affects the array position. The idea is that the robot drives along, it can check the status of the walls by looking left, right, and forward. These functions will get the proper location in the array, making the check an easy one-liner.

Graphics

This program comes with a simple, friendly graphics API that allow OpenGL novices to draw objects on the screen. Screen layout is unusual for a normal graphics application in that the screen space is in units of pixels and starts at the bottom left corner of the window. This makes placement more intuitive for people who are used to graphing in mathematics.

To draw a rectangle with a position of x, y and dimensions of width, height - all in pixel coordinates:

// in program init
Rectangle* rect = new Rectangle(x, y, width, height);

// in draw loop
rect->draw();

It is also simple to change the properties of the rectangle on the fly:

// change position
Rectangle::setPos(int x, int y);
Rectangle::translate(int x, int y);

// resizing
Rectangle::resize(int width, int height);

There is also support for coloring rectangles...