Slashdot Mirror
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).
The Arduino is responsible for controlling highly-tuned acceleration / deceleration curves to drive the stepper motors.
This is very similar to the way mechanical hard drives position their read/write heads via magnetic coil. Depending on the distance (number of cylinders) that the heads need to travel across, a proportional amount of current is applied to accelerate the arm with the heads attached. After just a few milliseconds, however, the heads need to start decelerating in order to come to rest precisely over the desired track without overshooting.
With both the Rubik's Cube and the hard drive, a physical object needs to be moved and then come to rest precisely in the blink of an eye. It's quite a neat trick of engineering.
That is a valid point of view.
The modifications are within those allowed by the WCA for human competitions.
Also the current Guinness record holder has done an even deeper modification ( which was the inspiration for us to go this route ).
Paul Rose ( the one from the video that doesn't talk )