A couple weeks ago we told you about the H.A.L.E. project that used Lego Mindstorms robots to take and send high-altitude pics from a weather balloon.  Today brings more Lego news.  It’s called the Tilted Twister.  Created by a Swedish man named Hans Andersen, this robot was built from a Mindstorms NXT kit that Andersen had purchased for his daughters, but, he says, “they have not had much access to it yet.”

“After building a tribot and a line follower I wanted to create something more spectacular.”

Andersen faced a number of challenges when he took on this project.  A major problem was that the optical sensor with the kit only detects grayscale, so some of the different colors on a Rubik’s cube looked identical to the bot.  (He managed to avoid this problem by changing the cube’s square colors).  Andersen coded the robot in C on his computer, but found that the program ran much slower when he ported it to the NXT bot.  His first algorithm solved the cube in 97 moves.  Andersen further tweaked the bot, and his current algorithm solves the Rubik’s cube in just 60 moves.

On his website he describes his process in more detail and has also made the code available.

This is definitely a cool project–sure, the name sounds like a carnival ride, but we can turn a blind eye on that in light of the fact that Rubik’s cubes are hard, and this thing dominates one in 60 tilted twists.

[Telegraph]

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]