MTI Tech News
How fast can you solve a Rubik’s Cube? A few days? Minutes? How about less than 10 seconds?
That’s what the Cubestormer 3 robot managed to do this weekend, solving the colorful puzzle in just 3.253 seconds.
The robot uses an ARM-powered Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone with an Exynos 5 Octa application processor and eight-core ARM big.LITTLE implementation featuring four ARM Cortex-A15 and four Cortex-A7 processors. The phone analyzes the cube, calculates the correct sequence of moves and instructs four robotic hands to do the manipulations. ARM9 processors also power the eight LEGO Mindstorm EV3 bricks that perform the motor sequencing and control.
Cubestormer 3
The Cubestormer 3 was at the Big Bang Fair in Birmingham, England on Saturday trying to break its 2012 record of 5.27 seconds, and it succeeded handily, earning it a Guinness World Record for fastest robot to solve a Rubik’s Cube.
“We knew Cubestormer 3 had the potential to beat the existing record but with the robot performing physical operations quicker than the human eye can see there’s always an element of risk,” co-inventor David Gilday said in a statement. “In the end, the hours we spent perfecting the robot and ensuring its motor and intelligence functions were properly synchronized paid off. Our big challenge now is working out if it’s possible to make it go even faster.”
Gilday and Mike Dobson (pictured), a security systems engineer for Securi-Plex, spent about 18 months designing Cubestormer 3. It features upgraded mechanics, like a precision independent braking system to boost speed. It’s also been optimized to take advantage of the increased mechanical flexibility as well as the compute power gains.
