What is it? MIT student Ben Katz and software engineer Jared Di Carlo wrote software for a robot that allowed the machine to solve the Rubik’s Cube in just 0.38 seconds, a world record. They beat their own world record of 0.637 seconds.
How does it work? The system obtains information about the distribution of the colors on the cube from a webcam and feeds it into the software. The software then feeds commands to an “insane nonlinear minimum-time sliding mode controller,” which operates the motor that turns the cube. For more on the theory that made this lightning-fast solution possible, see an earlier MIT article “The math of the Rubik’s cube”