Growing up, I remember the struggle of only being able to solve one side of the Rubik's Cube. It seemed to get more confusing the more I looked at it. However, with the advanced technology today, a 3x3 Rubik's cube can be solved in less than a second! To be exact, in 0.38 seconds now. The world record for the fastest Rubik's Cube solving machine used to be 0.637 seconds, set by Infineon Technologies AG on November 10, 2016.
However, Jared noticed that "all of Rubik's Cube solvers were using stepper motors" and "thought that [they] could do better if [they] used better motors." So, they did! Ben Katz and Jared Di Carlo collaborated on creating a Rubik's Cube solving machine using a set of 6 Kollmorgen ServoDisc U9-series motors and 2 PlayStation Eye cameras.
The record of 0.38 seconds includes acquiring the image from the camera, detecting colors, finding a solution, and actually rotating the faces of the cube. The motor controllers step through the moves one by one and remain synchronized with the AND BOARD, which tells all the motor controllers when the current move is finished.
What's amazing is, Ben believes the machine could go even faster! According to Ben's blog post, each 90-degree move takes about 10 ms, but the machine is actually only doing a move every ~15 ms. For the time being, Ben and Jared are not interested in playing the tuning game but may go back to shave off another 100ms or so.
Here also a bonus video below featuring a cube exploding mid-solve:
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