Papers › Solving Rubik's Cube with a Robot Hand

Solving Rubik's Cube with a Robot Hand

16 Oct 2019arXiv:1910.07113archive 2025-07-28

OpenAI, Ilge Akkaya, Marcin Andrychowicz, Maciek Chociej, Mateusz Litwin, Bob McGrew, Arthur Petron, Alex Paino, Matthias Plappert, Glenn Powell, Raphael Ribas, Jonas Schneider, Nikolas Tezak, Jerry Tworek, Peter Welinder, Lilian Weng, Qiming Yuan, Wojciech Zaremba, Lei Zhang

We demonstrate that models trained only in simulation can be used to solve a manipulation problem of unprecedented complexity on a real robot. This is made possible by two key components: a novel algorithm, which we call automatic domain randomization (ADR) and a robot platform built for machine learning. ADR automatically generates a distribution over randomized environments of ever-increasing difficulty. Control policies and vision state estimators trained with ADR exhibit vastly improved sim2real transfer. For control policies, memory-augmented models trained on an ADR-generated distribution of environments show clear signs of emergent meta-learning at test time. The combination of ADR with our custom robot platform allows us to solve a Rubik's cube with a humanoid robot hand, which involves both control and state estimation problems. Videos summarizing our results are available: https://openai.com/blog/solving-rubiks-cube/

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

bay3s/auto-dr mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
sabeaussan/ROS_Unity mentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Meta-LearningRubik's CubeState Estimation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Test

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections