The drivers to develop my project were:

Rubik′s cube is a "best seller" category toy, more than 350 millions of units

Time to solve by humans has been decreasing from 22 seconds in 1982 to 3.47 second in 2018

Brilliant mathematicians as Kociemba, Rokiki and Fridrich has been fascinated with the toy - at adult age!!!

Thera are people solving cubes blindfolded - 48 cubes in less than one hour

Opencv and Python are subject I wanted to know, so I choose this challenge

I need a pandemic project to maintain soul balance and my mind working in new knowledge as a mechanism to use the spare time

Conceptualization:

I took the Matt2uy design and optimize the image recognition and algorithm to solve by implementing the Herbert kociemba algorithm.

Process of development

It was an instinctive and observation process of the mechanics -assay and error - 4 models I built until found the more accurate and with more repeatibility featuring.

The idea was to built knowledge based on existent knowledge, so Instructables, youtube, github were very important knowledge's sources.

Results

Implementing some changes I got to save about 20-24 minutes solving the cube - Average time is 6 to 8 minutes to solve.

If you are looking for speed solving, please see my other project, this is more about strategies to solve a problem, learning and patient.

This video summarize, as integrated view, what I did:

Rubik′s cube solver Robot - 6-8 mins to solve

Process:

Cube images are captured by a python program module, then color extraction for each sticker is proceesed by other program module and finally the cube is solved by Kociemba algorithm, the solution is sent to Arduino trough a serial port. Once the solution is received the arduino code start to processing the movements, after 6-8 minutes the process finish and the robot show all the faces of the cube solved.

Next challenge

Based on this project I moved forward and got from 6 minutes to 30 seconds, 18 seconds time to solve. In other video I explain how can we reach 18 seconds. Please watch, below, my comparison video:

30 seconds vs.6-8 minutes

What for?

This robot is designed to teach:

1. Patient, resilience, frustration management

2. Repeatability and Accuracy, applied to robots

3. Rubik's cube notation, solving algorithms

4. Maths: matrixes theory, statistical, group theory,

5. Programming: Arduino-Python

6. Image processing with openCV