Prototype Design for Rubik’s Cube Solver

Abstract

Rubik’s cube is a modern day plastic material puzzle, where the one need to twist and turn to solve the multicolour squares. At the end, the puzzle need to be solved to make all the same colour cubes on the same surfaces. High intelligence is needed to solve it at a shorter time. Therefore, this research is to create a robot solver to solve the Rubik’s cube in short time smartly. Initially, the algorithm will scan the six surfaces of unsolved cube through a webcam and register the colours in the memory. Once it is completed, the solving algorithm will analyse and instruct the servo motors to twist and turn based on the computed solution. It is then pass it to the solving algorithm to identify the solving process and send the moving instruction to the motors by Raspberry Pi. The robot body was constructed using laser cutter. It is to make sure that the measurements are accurate and correct. To solve the cube, four servo motors with high efficiency were used to twist the cube in certain legit with the rules of the game. Another four servo motors are connected to the rack and pinion gears by clamping to hold the Rubik’s cube from falling when it is twisted. An improvised “Kociemba Algorithm”, also called as “The Two-Phase-Algorithm” is used. It reduced the required moves to solve the cube into a maximum of 25 moves and a minimum of 19. Conclusively, the final prototype discussed in this paper is tested with the solving algorithm. The results are presented.