Four engineering students at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, have built a robot that solves the 4x4 cube in 9.806 seconds. It did it on Friday 16 October 2026, in an official Guinness World Records attempt. Now they're waiting for Guinness World Records to confirm it.
If it does, it's a huge jump: the robot that held the record took about 45 seconds, and this one needs less than a quarter of that.
It all started with a video
The team is Maz Cameron, Johann Torres, Caleb Everitt and Hayden Watson, fourth-year mechatronics engineering students. The idea came from a video on social media of the record-holding robot solving the 4x4 in 45 seconds. They reckoned it could be done much faster, and set about building their own machine.
How it works
Four cameras look at the cube and pick out the colour of every sticker. With that data, an open-source algorithm works out the moves that solve it, and some very fast motors carry them out.
The trick is in the design. The previous robot could only turn layers on two of the cube's three axes, so every now and then it had to turn the whole cube over, a move that gets it no closer to the solution. The Canterbury robot turns layers on all three axes and skips those wasted turns. It also holds the cube with suction cups, which move it faster and more precisely.
Faster than any human
The official 4x4 world record in competition is 15.18 seconds, held by Tymon Kolasiński of Poland. The Canterbury robot is more than 5 seconds faster.
On the classic Rubik's Cube, the 3x3, machines go even further. In 2025, Guinness recognised a robot built by Purdue University students (United States) that solved it in 0.103 seconds, less than the blink of an eye. The human 3x3 record is 2.51 seconds.
Our Rubik's Cube solver does something similar, minus the motors: take photos of your cube with your phone camera (or paint in the colours) and it tells you which moves to make. If you'd rather learn to solve it yourself, there's our step-by-step Rubik's Cube solution. And the fastest times are on the Rubik's Cube records page.