For that reason, and for the joy of combining the Rubik’s Cube with robotics, we present CubeStormer from RoboticSolutions.

The claim is that this Lego Mindstorms RCX Speedcubing Robot can solve any 3³ in under twelve seconds. The video shows this: I’m happy to take their word on the machine being handed random cubes.

Just brilliant.

Kinda makes your human attempts at solving the cube rather futile, eh? Never mind. You can always dress up as a Rubik’s Cube instead.

Via

As you might imagine, it’s quite a complex procedure that involves scanning the digits already present and working out which squares are blank.

Processing the scanned image requires setting a threshold value to remove noise, segmenting to work out which marks are part of the digit, thinning to one pixel wide and then checking the features to find out what the digit is.

Solving the Sudoku puzzle is the relatively easy bit, though the Mindstorm processor is slow and doesn’t allow recursive functions, so took some time to optimize.

Then comes the time to write in all those digits, column by column. The whole process is very slow, for all sorts of reasons, and it won’t be beating a human Sudoku champion any time soon (even if it solved the puzzle more quickly), but that’s not the point. This is a trés cool application.

Read more at Tilted Twister