Rubik's Cube

2024: Russian robot breaks world record for Rubik's cube assembly

A Russian-designed robot has set a new world record for high-speed assembly of a Rubik cube, collecting a puzzle in 0.203 seconds. This became known in early August 2024. This achievement significantly surpassed the previous record of 0.305 seconds set by a robot of the Japanese company Mitsubishi Electric Corporation.

According to RIA Novosti, the creator of the record holder is Alexander Krotov, the developer of Yandex. Krotov designed the robot specifically to assemble the cube, using publicly available components such as motors for autonomous technology and cameras for game consoles.

The process of assembling the Rubik Cube by a robot consists of several stages. In the first 10 milliseconds, the device captures the edges of the puzzle with cameras and processes the resulting images using a special program. The robot spends the next 8 milliseconds planning actions, calculating the optimal assembly sequence. The final stage - directly assembling the cube - takes 184 milliseconds, during which six motors simultaneously rotate the edges of the puzzle.

To achieve a record result, Krotov optimized the robot's program code and configured its components for the most efficient interaction. Particular attention was paid to the processes of shooting and processing images from cameras. The developer used specialized drivers to control various elements of the robot, including motors. Motor models were chosen that can quickly gain high speed, similar to those used in delivery robots and electric scooters.

The time taken by the robot to assemble the Rubik's cube is less than it takes the human brain to realize the image seen or the eye to blink. By comparison, the human record in speedcubing - the speed assembly of the Rubik's cube - is 3.13 seconds, more than 15 times slower than the robot's result.^[1]

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