A-mazing Robot

For a long time there have been contests where robots find their way through a mazes.  The performance of some of these little gadgets has gotten to be very impressive.  Just take a look at the video.

Apparently there are two phases to the competition.  The video above is the speed run.  Before that comes the searching/learning phase, shown below.  The robots go through the maze searching for the finishing point and then plot an optimal path from start to finish.  Then on the speed run, they take what they've learned and go as fast as they can (as seen in the first video).  Both phases seem pretty impressive to me.