Four University of Canterbury students have turned a final-year project into a 9.806-second attempt at a Guinness World Record.

Caleb Everitt, Hayden Watson, Maz Cameron and Johann Torres built a robot designed to solve a 4x4 Rubik’s Cube faster than the current robotic benchmark and the human record. The team made its official attempt on Friday, 16 October, and is awaiting confirmation from Guinness World Records.

Their recorded time is below the 15-second human benchmark the students were aiming to beat. The group had seen a record-holding robot solve the more complex 4x4 cube in 45 seconds and decided the gap between machine and human performance was an engineering challenge worth testing.

The project divided the work across mechanical design, electrical and motor control, computer vision and software. Four cameras read the cube’s colours before an open-source algorithm works out a solution; the machine then uses high-speed motors and a mechanism that can access all three axes without repeatedly reorienting the cube.

Everitt said the design avoids movements that cost the earlier robot time. Suction cups were also added so the cube can be moved more quickly and precisely than a gravity-led return would allow.

The work was funded by UC’s Mechanical Engineering Department and used fast motors commonly found in drones, paired with specialised controllers. The students said lighting, colour recognition, structural rigidity and preventing jams at high speed were among the problems they had to solve through repeated testing.

All four are finishing their studies this year and have secured graduate engineering roles for 2027. The robot will remain at UC, where the team hopes it will give future students a tangible example of what a focused capstone project can achieve.