Given a long plane ride and enough booze, I can just about solve a Rubik’s cube. The most talented humans can manage it in about five seconds; for a homemade robot, it takes 1.019 seconds.
Hardware-wise, there’s not much complicated about the robot, built by two hobbyists: there’s webcams, a few stepper motors, and an interface that lets the robot turn the cube. The webcams feed back into a well-known algorithm, which determines the fewest number of moves to solve the cube in the fastest possible time.
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The 1.019-second robotic best time is being submitted for consideration as the new world record; while that’s being mulled over, the LEGO solvers have some work to do.