Students from UC Berkeley built a Rubik’s Cube solving robot that’s capable of solving a cube no matter how random you make it. The robot takes a few seconds to think and then can typically solve a cube in 23 moves or less.

[BJ]

Though it looks like some kind of Moon robot, the Tilted Twister, a LEGO NXT robot, can solve a Rubik’s cube without the help of a PC. The Tilted Twister is able to perform this feat of geek daring thanks to an ultrasonic sensor that reads the colors of the faces on the cube, calculates the moves needed to solve the cube and it’s solved. Video below my fellow geeks.

Unless you wore a pocket protector and had taped up glasses, you probably never solved the Rubik’s cube. Probably because you were too busy getting dates. Anyway, the new geek way to solve this puzzle is to let a robot do it.

A group of engineering students at Austria’s Carinthia University of Applied Sciences recently spent a year developing a robot that can look at a Rubik’s cube and then solve it within 2-minutes. It’s pretty much a vision system with custom programmed algorithms that control the robotic arms.

If that isn’t fast enough for you, how about a Kawasaki robot that can do it in seconds? This bot has built-in sensors and a large flat-panel display to show the current position and how many more moves to completion. It can solve it in 6-seconds.

[Techeblog]