Solving Rubik's Cubes with Baxter!

Charles Schaff

With the help of other members of the RIPL lab at the TTIC, I developed and showed our Baxter robot solving a Rubik's Cube at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago for the 2019 National Robotics Week exhibit. Using only cameras mounted on Baxer our robot is able to find cubes on a table, pick them up, scan the cube to determine its state, and manipulate the cube until solved. We use clustering techniques to determine the colors on each face of the cube, Kociemba's two phase algorithm for solving the cube, and visual servoing to accurately turn cube faces.