A new Guinness World Record has been set in Germany for the fastest-solved Rubik’s cube by a robot, which unscrambled the puzzle in just 0.637 seconds with 21 moves.
The Sub1 Reloaded beat a previous record of 0.887 seconds, which was achieved by an earlier version of the same machine using a different processor.
The computer receives two pictures of the cube, identifies the colour of each piece and calculates a solution with Tom Rokicki’s extremely fast implementation of Herbert Kociemba’s Two Phase Algorithm.
The solution is handed over to an Arduino-compatible Infineon AURIX microcontroller board, which orchestrates the 21 moves of six high performance steppers, to turn each side of the cube.
Within a fraction of a second of the robot’s camera senses being lifted, it found the solution and the six mechanical arms unscrambled the puzzle perfectly in 21 moves.
It was only afterwards that the number of moves could be counted by checking a software readout.
German semiconductor manufacturer Infineon Technologies, which staged the record attempt, provided the chip to highlight advancements in self-driving car tech.