LEGO Robot Solves Traditional Rubik’s Cube in a Record-Breaking 3.253 Seconds

In this short video, the CUBESTORMER 3 robot created by programmers Mike Dobson and David Gilday solves a traditional 3x3x3 Rubik’s Cube puzzle in 3.253 seconds — breaking the Guinness World Record set in 2011 by the CUBESTORMER 2 — at the recent Big Bang Fair in Birmingham, England.

CUBESTORMER 3 is made mostly out of LEGO blocks with a Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone acting as the brain that images the puzzle, determines the solution, and directs four robotic hands to solve it.

The custom app developed for the smartphone uses the phone’s camera to capture images of each face of the Rubik’s Cube which it processes to determine the scrambled colors. The solution is found using an advanced two-phase algorithm that was originally developed for Speedcuber and then enhanced to make effective use of the dual-core ARM Cortex®-A9 based processor in a Samsung Galaxy SII smartphone used in CubeStormer II. Further optimizations were made to take advantage of the eight-core big.LITTLE™ processor configuration featuring four Cortex-A15 and four Cortex-A7 processors in the Galaxy S4.