2023 Author: Bryan Walter | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 22:24
Robotics specialist Ben Katz and software developer Jared Di Carlo have created a robot that can solve a Rubik's cube in 0.38 seconds. This is a record time, Di Carlo says on his blog, although it hasn't been officially confirmed at the moment.
The Rubik's cube was invented back in 1974, but the puzzle is still very popular today. People who are fond of high-speed assembly of the Rubik's cube are called speedcubers, and the process itself is called speedcubing (from the English speedcubing). Today's record belongs to the American Lucas Etter, who in November 2015 completed the puzzle in 4,904 seconds. Similar competitions are also held among robots: until now, the robot engineers from the Infeon company was considered the unofficial "champion". In 2016, he solved the Rubik's cube in 0.637 seconds. However, now Katz and Di Carlo have developed a robot that improved the result of the previous record holder by 40 percent.
Like all such devices, the robot researchers uses a camera (in this case, the PlayStation Eye), which transmits images of the sides of the Rubik's cube to the computer. It determines the placement of the puzzle pieces, and then passes the data to the min2phase program, which is based on Herbert Kotsemba's two-phase algorithm. In a split second, the computer calculates the optimal solution to the problem, after which it gives a command to the robot, and he moves all the elements in the right way.
To speed up the process, Katz used Kollmorgen ServoDisk motors, which have a very high torque-to-inertia ratio. In addition, the engineer built a special controller that allows you to rotate the side of the Rubik's cube 90 degrees in just 10 milliseconds. Provided that the puzzle can be assembled, on average, in 19-23 moves, the robot Katz and Di Carlo should solve the problem in 0.25 seconds. However, in reality, the process takes 0.38 seconds, since now the car makes one movement every 15 milliseconds.
The developers are confident that they will be able to improve their results in the future. Now the setup process is time-consuming, since debugging must be done with a high-speed camera, and mistakes sometimes lead to puzzle breakage or explosion of field-effect transistors. However, for a hundred different solutions, only 4 Rubik's cubes were needed. The video below shows one of the failed attempts to assemble the puzzle:
Recently, programmer Martin Spanel developed software that allows you to solve Rubik's cube using augmented reality glasses. In real time, it displays the desired action using an AR headset right on top of one of the cube faces.
