Rubik's Cube World Record

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You might recall that during the Olympics, American gymnast Stephen Nedoroscik (better known as Pommel Horse Guy) was the hero of STEM types everywhere when it was revealed that, as a Rubik’s Cube enthusiast, he prepared for competition by solving the cube in 8.5 seconds.

That is incredibly fast, and the world record of 3.13 seconds, by Max Park is faster still. But those times pale in comparison to the speed of the robot developed by a team of students from Purdue University’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. They’ve built a machine (dubbed Purdubik’s Cube) whose solution time is approaching zero: 0.103 seconds, and they’re hoping to tweak it further to get that time below a tenth of a second.

According to the esteemed beer purveyors at Guinness, whose world record authority is renowned, the Purdue team’s robot now holds the Guinness World Record for “Fastest robot to solve a puzzle cube." For reference, that’s quicker than the blink of an eye, which takes two or three tenths of a second and crushes the previous official record of 0.305 seconds, which was set by a team of Mitsubishi Electric professional engineers in May 2024.

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The Purdue undergrads who bested the Mitsubishi pros are Junpei Ota, Aden Hurd, Matthew Patrohay, and Alex Berta. They met while participating in Purdue’s co-op program for work rotations. “It helped us build not only the friendships that led to this collaboration but also the professional and technical skills we needed to actually pull it off,” said Hurd, demonstrating some of the many benefits of co-oping for engineering students. This real-world experience also helped them secure corporate sponsorships to support the project.

Team member Patrohay’s motivational fire to take on this challenge goes back to his high school years. “Back in high school, I saw a video of MIT students solving the cube in 380 milliseconds. I thought, ‘That’s a really cool project. I’d love to try and beat it someday.,’” he recalled. “Now here I am at Purdue—proving we can go even faster.”

The team unveiled their project at Purdue’s SPARK annual student design competition in December 2024 and continued refining the robot after the event. Purdue’s robot uses machine vision for color recognition, custom solving algorithms optimized for execution time, and industrial-grade motion control hardware from Kollmorgen. Its movement is programmed to maximize acceleration, deceleration, and mechanical efficiency.

“Before you realize we’ve solved it, we’ve solved it,” observed Patrohay. “Before you realize it is moving, we’ve solved it.”

While the Kollmorgen robotic hardware could still go faster, the plastic cube itself is the obstacle. “The cubes are really the biggest limitation at this point,” he explained in the team’s YouTube video. “The cubes themselves just kind of disintegrate. Pieces just snap in half and fall apart.”

The solution is obviously more engineering. “We did a lot of mechanical optimization inside the Rubik’s Cube,” Patrohay continued. “We designed a custom internal core that holds all the pieces together stronger because the original one was very weak. There’s a lot of optimization inside each center piece to ensure we don’t slip or turn-in-places don’t happen. The design was able to bring together all of our knowledge from other course work.”

Observers can try their best to befuddle Purdubik’s Cube by scrambling the cube themselves through Bluetooth-enabled Smart Cube. Of course, the robot solves the cube instantly once the scramble is complete.

“What I really love about it is that senior design allowed us to bring together everything we’ve learned,” said Patrohay. “From our freshman year on, you build skills—but this project showed how they all come together to create something meaningful.”

“This achievement isn’t just about breaking a record, it pushes the boundaries of what synthetic systems can do,” said Nak-seung Patrick Hyun, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, who mentored the student team. “It brings us closer to understanding ultra-fast coordinated control systems like those found in nature.”