Posted in: SERVO Blog (03/25 at 02:36 PM)
CUBESTORMER 3 Smashes Rubik’s Cube Speed Record
The ARM-Powered CUBESTORMER 3 robot has smashed the Guinness World Record for solving a Rubik's cube, recording a time of 3.253 seconds at the Big Bang Fair in Birmingham, UK.
The robot employs an ARM-powered Samsung® Galaxy S4 smartphone powered by a Samsung Exynos 5 Octa application processor to analyze the cube and instruct four robotic hands to do the manipulations. ARM9™ processors also power the eight LEGO® MINDSTORMS® EV3 bricks which perform the motor sequencing and control.
CUBESTORMER 3 was designed, built and programmed by Mike Dobson and David Gilday, creators respectively of CubeStormer http://youtu.be/eaRcWB3jwMo and Android Speedcuber http://youtu.be/ylFb4pqAUd8 and more recently, co-creators of CubeStormer II http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d0LfkIut2M.
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 powered by an Exynos 5 Dual application processor used in CubeStormer II. Further optimizations were made to take advantage of the eight-core big.LITTLE™ processor configuration in the Exynos 5 Octa application processor featuring four Cortex-A15 and four Cortex-A7 processors in the Galaxy S4.
Human speedcubers' solve times only include the physical manipulation of the cube and do not include some time which is allowed to "inspect" the cube beforehand. Times recorded by CUBESTORMER 3 are for the total solve including: image capture, software solution calculation and physical solve.