Purdue students earn world record with Rubik’s Cube robot
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowA team of students from Purdue University has earned the Guinness World Record for the fastest robot to solve a Rubik’s Cube.
The device, dubbed the Purdubik’s Cube, has been proven to solve the puzzle cube in 0.103 seconds, which is faster than the blink of an eye.
The Purdue team beat the previous record of 0.305 seconds, which was set by a group of Mitsubishi Electric engineers in Japan in May 2024.
“[To] put it in perspective, a human blink is around 200 to 300 milliseconds, so we’re significantly faster than that. Human reaction time is 100-200 as well, and so we’re faster than that,” said team member Matthew Patrohay. “Basically, before you even realize it’s solved, we’ve solved it. Before you even realize it’s moving, we’ve solved it.”
Patrohay and his fellow team members–Junpei Ota, Aden Hurd and Alex Berta–came together in Purdue’s Cooperative Education Program. Purdue said the team was able to secure corporate sponsorships to support the project.
According to the university, the Purdubik’s Cube uses machine vision for color recognition, custom-solving algorithms that have been optimized for execution time, and industrial-grade motion control hardware.
Patrohay said the cubes themselves were the biggest limitation for the project.
“The cubes themselves just kind of disintegrate. The pieces just snap in half and fall apart,” he said. “We did a lot of mechanical interior optimization inside the Rubik’s Cube. We designed a custom internal core that holds all the pieces together stronger, because the old one was very weak. And we also do a lot of optimization inside each centerpiece to ensure we basically just don’t slip or have turn in places happen.”
The team also worked to make the machine interactive by creating a Bluetooth-enabled “smart cube” that allows users to scramble the puzzle in real time. The robot then mirrors every move and solves the cube instantly once the scramble is complete.
“What I really love about it is that senior design allowed us to bring together everything we’ve learned,” said Patrohay. “From our freshman year on, you build skills—but this project showed how they all come together to create something meaningful.”
Milind Kulkarn head of Purdue’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, said in a news release that the project is a shining example of the school’s commitment to hands-on learning.
“Take brilliant students, give them the tools and opportunities, and they’ll blow your mind,” said Kulkarni. “Four undergraduate ECE students, in less than a year, crushed a record set by a world-class team at Mitsubishi. I always say we have the best ECE students in the country — and this proves it. I couldn’t be more proud.”