Blink and you’ll miss it: A Purdue University student engineering team has built a robot that can solve a Rubik’s cube in one-tenth of a second — faster than the average time it takes to blink an eye.
Their robot, called “Purdubik’s Cube,” set a Guinness World Record last month for the “fastest robot to solve a puzzle cube.” It successfully solved a mixed-up cube in just 0.103 seconds, a fraction of the previous record of 0.305 seconds, set by Mitsubishi Electric engineers in May 2024.
The robot, located on the Purdue campus in West Lafayette, Indiana, uses machine vision for color recognition, custom solving algorithms optimized for execution time and industrial-grade motion control hardware, according to a Purdue University press release.
The team, consisting of engineering students Junpei Ota, Aden Hurd, Matthew Patrohay and Alex Berta, initially created the robot to compete in the December 2024 Spark Challenge, a design competition for students in Purdue’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. After they won first place, they continued to improve the robot with sponsorship help from Purdue’s Institute for Control, Optimization and Networks.
The achievement isn’t all fun and games: Ultra-fast coordinated robotic systems like Purdubic’s Cube are already used in a variety of industries, including in manufacturing and packaging applications.
The Rubik’s Cube first become a cultural phenomenon in the 1980s, languished in the 1990s, and has enjoyed a surprise resurgence with the rise of the internet helping lead to speedcubing — competitions to see how fast people (and now machines) can solve the 3 x 3 puzzle.
People now regularly compete in events to solve Rubik’s Cubes in a variety of ways, even blindfolded. But the fastest person can’t come close to Purdue’s robot. The current human world record is held by Max Park, who solved a cube in 3.13 seconds in 2023.
