A senior project taken on by a group of five Mechanical Engineering undergrads at UC Berkeley, including two current IMI staff members Milad Davaloo and Curtis Lui, CuBear started out as a very ambitious goal for a group of inexperienced students who set out to break the world record for the fastest solving Rubik's Cube robot ever. Under the supervision of Dr. Anwar who taught the ME senior lab class at UC Berkeley at the time, the group was able to deliver and showcase the robot, and after spending the following summer tweaking the hardware and the software, they presented the robot at NIWEEK 2008, held at Austin, Texas.

Cubear now resides on the campus of UC Berkeley at Hesse Hall, where students get to come and take a look at the robot and see the work that was put into it, and every once in a while see it solve a randomly scrambled cube in 7 seconds or less.

The Inverted pendulum is a classic controls problem. Dr. Anwar, who taught the undergraduate level Automated Controls Systems class (ME 134) at UC Berkeley for the Fall semester of 2009, developed the platform and the operational software to be easily adopted by students without extensive or formal programming knowledge. Using the software, students empirically identified controller gains that stabilized a classical inverted pendulum. The video shows Dr. Anwar testing his system to make sure it is ready to be handed over to students.