Developed by Ben Katz, a robotics student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Jared Di Carlo, a software developer, the robot was able to capture an image of the unsolved cube, compute all the moves necessary to solve it and then execute those moves, all in just 0.38 seconds.
Just for comparison, back in 2011 it took a robot made of Legos 5.3 seconds to do that, which is slightly slower than today’s human record of 4.59 seconds. The official world record for a robot currently stands at 0.637 seconds (set in 2016), but if this robot can repeat its performance under official record-testing conditions, that may soon change.
Watch the robot in action in the video below — but don’t blink or you might miss it.
Kate is a senior copy editor in Northern California. She holds a bachelor's degree in English with a minor in professional writing from the University of California, Davis.
