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To Solve a Rubik's Cube In 1 Second, It Takes a Robot
The Next Web features a quick look at an eyebrow-raisingly fast Rubik's Cube-solving robot, created by developers Jay Flatland and Paul Rose. How fast? The robot can solve a scrambled cube in one second (as long as you're willing to round down consistent solutions in "less than 1.2 seconds") which makes for some fun repeat views on YouTube. One speed-shaving element of the design: Rather than grip the cube with a robot hand, Flatland and Rose essentially made the cube an integral part of the system, by drilling holes in the cube's center faces, and attaching stepper motors directly. (Also at Motherboard).
Well, as the summary says it's not a stock Rubik's cube but rather one that has been modified and permanently installed into the system.
That means that they don't really need to monitor the progress optically. They just need to keep track of how much the stepper motors have turned.
Since you can't place a stock cube in there I also don't really see the point of having the physical manifestation. If they were to render a cube on a display they could easily get the time down to 10ms.
Instead of building a Rubik's cube solver they redefined the problem and claimed it solved.
its just a basic PID controller.
I work with PID controllers very frequently. I still consider them a damn amazing and neat trick of engineering. Just because something becomes common shouldn't mean that we stop marvelling at the genius thought that went behind creating it.