Some people simply can't be bothered to learn how to solve a cube and want to just watch a robot do it for them, others know how to solve a cube but still find it fun to watch a robot do it. While there are always people wondering whether it is possible that in the future, puzzles could be scrambled by robots at competitions to speed up the process and avoid misscrambles, it is unlikely that this will happen any time soon. For now, cube solving robots are essentially just fun toys for cubers to play around with.
There are two commercial cube solving robots available:
The Gan Robot:
The Gan robot can solve a cube faster than most humans, however, it requires a Gan smartcube to work properly and needs to be connected to the app, if everything is set up properly and you press solve on the app then the Gan Robot will do two moves to check everything is right and then solve the cube in around 5 seconds after that. The Gan robot does also have a scramble feature but it is rather redundant as it is bound to take most people longer to put the puzzle into the 5 arms of the robot and press scramble than it does for a decent cuber to just scramble the puzzle anyway.
The MoYu Robot takes a lot longer to solve a cube and is a bit more fiddly to get set up correctly, however, the MoYu Robot is able to solve any cube with their special centre caps provided in the box without connecting to the app or any internet connection. The MoYu robot has its own mini computer which does a sequence of moves on the cube so that it can scan every piece one by one, once it has finished scanning, it begins solving the puzzle, while it is much slower than the Gan robot, it is interesting to watch it solve the cube all on its own.
Other cube robots have been made which are able to solve cubes significantly faster but these are not commercially available, engineering companies and students try to break the world record for fastest robot solve every so often as a show of the mechanical ability of their products, the current world record for a solve by a robot is 0.305 seconds which was set by a team at Mitsibushi Electric in May 2024.
The challenges lie more in the mechanics of the system than cubes themselves, a computer is able to find a 20 move solution every time but those moves have to be executed incredibly fast. The fastest robots will have 6 arms linking to the 6 faces of the cube which will allow for maximum speed. The challenge is making one exact move every 0.015 seconds or faster. Commercial cube solving robots only have 5 arms which means they have to take slightly longer solutions as they are unable to turn the top layer.
