This Robot Can Crack Any Master Lock

What, you may ask, are these three hotties and that one guy doing holding what looks like a logic board? That would be the LockCracker, a robot designed to ensure no gym locker can stand in its way, and helping advance the arrival of our robot overlords just that little step closer.

Designed and built by Jessica Bethune, Aiswary Kolisetty, Jessica Noglows, and Rob Sobecki at The Olin College of Engineering, or Team JARJ as they call themselves, the LockCracker is pretty ingenious. Designed around Master Locks, the user inputs what they know of the combination into the computer, clicks the mouse, and the LockCracker takes care of the rest, physically running every possible combination if necessary to open the lock. As a nice bonus, it displays the combination to the user, so you don’t have to use the LockCracker twice.

It’s actually a pretty ingenious project, and believe it or not, it was done for class. They had to custom-engineer a mechanical system, design an electrical system around it, and code the software in C and Python.

No word on what the team will do next, or if the LockCracker has any future beyond a resume line, but we hope it enters production, if for no other reason than we’d really like to get our gym bag back. Check out their website for the project, and full details on how they built it, at the LockCracker official site.