ARM-powered robot breaks Rubik’s Cube world record

19th March 2014

ARM Ltd

Nat Bowers

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At the Big Bang Fair in Birmingham, UK, the CUBESTORMER 3 robot smashed the Guinness World Record title for solving a Rubik’s Cube, recording a time of 3.253 seconds. Using ARM processor technology, this is the fastest-ever time set by a robot for the completion of a Rubik’s cube. Co-inventors David Gilday and Mike Dobson worked on the project in their spare time.

The new record beats the existing time of 5.27 seconds set two years by the same team. David Gilday is a principle engineer at ARM, the world’s leading processor design company based in Cambridge, and co-inventor Mike Dobson, a security systems engineer for Securi-Plex.

The record-breaking robot employs intelligence from a Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone powered by an Exynos 5 Octa application processor with an eight-core ARM big.LITTLE implementation featuring four Cortex-A15 and four Cortex-A7 processors. The phone analyses the cube, calculates the correct sequence of moves and instructs four robotic hands to do the manipulations. ARM9 processors also power the eight LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 bricks which perform the motor sequencing and control.

Additional features include a precision independent braking system that delivers significant speed benefits and software optimised to take advantage of this increased mechanical flexibility and the compute power gains.

David Gilday, commented: “We knew CUBESTORMER 3 had the potential to beat the existing record but with the robot performing physical operations quicker than the human eye can see there’s always an element of risk. In the end, the hours we spent perfecting the robot and ensuring its motor and intelligence functions were properly synchronised paid off. Our big challenge now is working out if it’s possible to make it go even faster. The robot demonstrates just how fast a Samsung Galaxy S4 can think. As well as working out the solution, the ARM-powered Exynos processor has to instruct the robot to carry out the moves. This is more complex than it seems because CUBESTORMER 3 uses a speed cube which allows twists before the sides are fully-aligned. It means the robot is effectively mirroring the same kind of judgement and dexterity that a human speed cuber has to apply.”