This Saturday an ARM-powered robot by the name of 'CUBESTORMER 3' will make its attempt at the robotic world record for solving a Rubik's Cube. The attempt will take place at the Big Bang Fair being held at the NEC in Birmingham, UK. The current world record is held by the robot's predecessor the 'CUBESTROMER II', which solved a Rubik's Cube in just 5.27 seconds just over two years ago.
What is the CUBESTORMER 3?
This custom designed robot's brain is actually a Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone which analyses the cube and instructs its four robotic hands during the manipulations. ARM informs us that there are also ARM9 processors utilised in the eight LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 bricks which perform the motor sequencing and control.
The latest version of the CUBESTORMER was made by David Gilday, a principal engineer at ARM, and Mike Dobson, a security systems engineer for Securi-Plex. The pair have worked on the fun project in their spare time over the last 18 months. We are told that as well as the upgraded smartphone at the heart of the system mechanics have been upgraded with "a precision independent braking system that will bring significant speed benefits". The CUBESTORMER's software has also been tweaked to work with the faster processing and mechanical ability.
Cube control confidence
"We are very confident the robot will break the record," said Dominic Vergine, head of corporate responsibility at ARM. "The new robot can think three times faster than its older brother. The older robot was using intelligence from a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 based Samsung Electronics Exynos 4 Dual application processor in a Samsung Galaxy S2 smartphone. CUBESTORMER 3 will use a Galaxy S4 equipped with an Exynos 5 Octa application processor with an eight-core ARM big.LITTLE implementation featuring four Cortex-A15 and four Cortex-A7 processors."
While the CUBESTORMER 3 is working and on demonstration at the Big Bang Fair from today (March 13) the makers want to fine tune it and have it running at peak performance for the official Guinness World Records attempt on Saturday. While at the fair ARM's David Gilday will also be attempting to set two further records; one for the completion of a 4x4xx cube using his MultiCuber 3 robot based on a Huawei Ascend P6 smartphone, also using his MultiCuber 999 robot, based on a Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone, he will try and break the record for solving a 9x9x9 cube.
The video above shows the 'CUBESTORMER 3' in training. Good luck to them…
