| Special thanks to www.tiltedtwister.com for releasing free building instructions, operating instructions, and source code to the public! This is a Lego Mindstorms robot called Tilted Twister. It uses 3 Motors, a touch sensor, and a Hitechnic color sensor (available at http to tilt, rotate, and twist a cube to solve it. It also uses an Ultrasonic sensor to know when you place a Rubik's cube in its grasp, or if the cube falls off the turntable by accident. What is really impressive about this robot, is how it can solve a Rubik's cube using only the elements of the retail kit of Lego Mindstorms (unless you are using a color sensor like me), and it can solve a cube without the use of a webcam, or a connection to a computer! The robot first uses a motor attached to a color sensor to scan all the colors of a cube, as well as using the turn-table motor and the grabber-arm motor to assist in this. Then, it resolves the center, edge, and corner colors of the cube, and generates 3 solutions using an optimized "corners first" method. It picks the solution with the least face turns (moves), and begins solving the cube. I have modified the robot a tiny bit by moving the color sensor up one level so that it can read the colors better. You could also use a light sensor for this robot, but then you would need to replace some colors on the cube or else the light sensor may not be able to see a difference in color between all 6 colors on the cube, therefore messing up the scanning and ... |
