This machine can solve a Rubik's Cube faster than most people blink

Blink and you'll miss it: A Purdue University student team has built a robot that can solve a Rubik's cube in one-tenth of a second.

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 behind Purdubik’s Cube— a high-speed robotic system that can solve a scrambled Rubik’s Cube in 0.103 seconds, including Junpei Ota, Aiden Hurd, Matthew Patrohay and Brock Berta.PurdueThe 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.