What...0.38 seconds!
A software developer Jared Di Carl and MIT Biometrics Lab Master's student Ben Katz has created a robot that can solve a Rubik's cube in 0.38 seconds, which is even faster than the world record, 0.637 seconds by a Hungarian architect.
Photo via YouTube
The researchers can break the record because they used a different kind of motor on their "Rubik's Contraption".
"We noticed that all of the fast Rubik's Cube solvers were using stepper motors, and thought that we could do better if we used better motors,' Di Carlo wrote in a blog post. "So we did."
The Rubik's Contraption
The robot they made is built from six Kollmorgen ServoDisc U9-series motors and six custom motor drivers. The multiple motors make the installation able to solve the Rubik's cube at lightning speeds.
Di Carlo and Katz also put two PlayStation Eye cameras at different corners of the contraption, making all six faces of the cube can be seen with just two devices.
PlayStation Eye is a camera that's equipped with computer vision and gesture recognition that allows it to quickly process photos grabbed instantly.
Except for Rubik's Contraption, researchers used another savvy, albeit "counterintuitive" to trick that helped them solve the puzzle in record speed.
They had to prevent the cube from "camming" or rotating when it moves very quickly.
The Rubik's Contraption
Katz and Di Carlo's experiment hasn't been made an official Guinness World Record since The Rubik's Contraption hasn't been reviewed by Guinness World Record officials.