Mechanical Automation with Vision: A Design for Rubik's Cube Solver

TL;DR

This paper presents an integrated mechanical and software system for solving Rubik's Cubes using real-time vision detection, robotic manipulation, and an efficient solving algorithm, achieving an average solve time of approximately 2.2 minutes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hardware-software design combining YOLO-based detection, a Unity GUI, and robotic control for automated Rubik's Cube solving.

Findings

High detection accuracy with YOLOv8 (Precision 0.98443, Recall 0.98419)

Average solving time of ~2.2 minutes

Effective integration of vision, control, and solving algorithms

Abstract

The core mechanical system is built around three stepper motors for physical manipulation, a microcontroller for hardware control, a camera and YOLO detection model for real-time cube state detection. A significant software component is the development of a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) designed in Unity. The initial state after detection from real-time YOLOv8 model (Precision 0.98443, Recall 0.98419, Box Loss 0.42051, Class Loss 0.2611) is virtualized on GUI. To get the solution, the system employs the Kociemba's algorithm while physical manipulation with a single degree of freedom is done by combination of stepper motors' interaction with the cube achieving the average solving time of ~2.2 minutes.