And you thought you were fast…
With their eyes set on the world record, Jay Flatland and Paul Rose last month unveiled an automated machine capable of solving a Rubik’s Cube in 0.9 seconds. However, their glory may be short-lived as fellow Maker and industrial engineer Adam Beer has introduced a robotic contender, named Sub1, that has unofficially sorted the colorful puzzle in only 0.887 seconds.
Beer’s machine required no more than 20 moves to unravel the cube, which was scrambled by a computer algorithm before being positioned in the robotic device. Unfortunately, since no Guinness World Record officials were in attendance when it happened, the Sub1 won’t be entering the books just yet. Beer’s attempt will still have to be verified before it can take the crown from Flatland and Rose.
As soon as the start button was hit, shutters were removed from Sub1’s two webcams, which each captured a picture of three sides of the cube. These images were then relayed to a laptop, which identified all the various colors and calculated a solution using Tomas Rokicki’s implementation of Herbert Kociemba’s two-phase algorithm.
The solution was sent over to an Arduino-compatible MCU that actuated six high performance steppers to perform the 20 moves. And only 887 milliseconds after the start button had been triggered, Sub1 reportedly broke a historic barrier.
Assuming the video is real, it looks like we’ll have a new champion in the very near future. Until them, you can marvel at both feats below.
Regardless the outcome, we can’t help but think that the two teams, and countless other Makers, will be eager to see how quickly they can unravel the Rubik’s Cube.
Filed under: Arduino-Compatible, Cool Things, Videos
