Robotic Rubik's Cube solvers are nothing new. We've seen ones that are run on Android, made of LEGO Mindstorms, and faster than the world record holder. The most recent Rubik's Cube robot making the news was made by high school student James Watson as a school project, but it's ended up getting a lot more attention than that.
So far, James has won prizes in the Brightsparks and Realise the Dream competitions in New Zealand, which got him an entry into Taiwan's International Science Fair. His robot is made of LEGOs and popsicle sticks, and the brains of the operation are controlled by an Arduino and a Python script.
The script solves the cube on the screen, then sends a list of moves to the Arduino so that it can give instructions to the servos to physically solve it. The best part is the little LEGO man who flips the cube around to the correct side before each move.
This robot takes about ten minutes to solve the cube, which is significantly longer than many previous builds, but that's because this one is so cleverly simple. James plans to speed it up by tweaking his algorithms and integrating a webcam for color recognition.
Check out the video to see it in action.
You can find more details and videos, plus photos of the first prototypes over on James's website.
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