Ridgeway and Zachary Grady, senior students from the electrical and computer engineering (ECE) department at Rowan University, have modeled a robot that solves the Rubik’s cube in 15 seconds.
Rubik's Cube-Solving Robot
The students, who have already got 17,000 hits on YouTube and a congratulatory note from Erno Rubik himself, have invested almost a year in the making of this robot.
The project was initiated when Rowan’s students were asked to create something innovative with sophisticated Siemens hardware. Students designed a rig with a smooth, metallic fixture that hits the suspended toy with great precision.
The resulting rig comes equipped with a computer brain, a special camera, and a donated Siemens programmable logic controller (PLC). In addition, when the cube’s colored sides are changed by the robot, it generates noisy and quick cranks. The robot twists the cube after 17 moves in an attempt to celebrate. Philip Mease, an ECE technician and expert, stated that the PLC used is the same equipment used for manufacturing robots.