Solved Rubik’s Cube in 0.38 Seconds

The Rubik's-solving robot was constructed at MIT this January by Ben Katz, a mechanical engineering graduate student, and Jared Di Carlo, an electrical engineering and computer science student, at a student-run hacker lab. According to a news release from MIT, the two became inspired when they noticed a design flaw in footage of the previous robot record-holder, a compact sphere of whirling motors created by German engineer Albert Beer.

In their new speed-solving robot, Katz and Di Carlo engineered individual motors to control six metal rods gripping the cube's six faces. Two webcams send footage of the cube to a nearby computer, helping the robot identify which colors fall on which face of the cube at a given time. Working from this information, the robot solves the cube with an algorithm previously used in other Rubik's-solving robots.

The 0.38 seconds starts from the moment the key press is registered on the computer, to when the last face is flipped, Katz said in his blog. It includes image capture and computation time, as well as actually moving the cube. The motion time is about 335 millisecond, and the remaining time is that of image acquisition and computation.

The robot had difficulty identifying the difference between the red and orange sides of the cube, so the researchers blackened the orange squares with a marker pen.

“For the time being, Jared and I have both lost interest in playing the tuning game, but we might come back to it eventually and shave off another 100 ms or so,” Katz said.

taken from external source.....