See Quester details and other references in David Buckley's website here. Quester was originally designed to be a micromouse maze solver, and later converted into a general purpose robot with added gripper (see above).
David also has a reference to the history of Micromouse competitions here.
For the original Micromouse competition, "The Amazing MicroMouse Maze Contest" c1978, see article here by Donald Christiansen.