- This is Dom.
He's a friendly little robot that's super good
at only one thing, setting up a butt ton of dominoes
really, really fast.
It's taken five years to get to this point,
but according to our initial test, we have hopes
that he might be more than 10 times faster
than the fastest human.
So today we're gonna put him to the test,
going head to head
against the world's foremost domino expert,
who unfortunately is a mere human.
Then we're gonna attempt a Guinness World Record
and he's gonna try and fill this entire warehouse
with a mural of a 100,000 dominoes.
And for context, setting up a domino mural that size
would take a team of seven skill builders one full week.
Dom here is gonna attempt to do it by himself in 24 hours.
Now I know what you're thinking,
"Big whoop, Mark," because as a kid you might have had a toy
that looked like this
or even this custom robot KiwiCo made me
that can drop 20 dominoes in a row.
So isn't it a bit overkill to utilize an autonomous robot
a half mile of Hot wheels tracks,
and a high speed robotic arm?
And I get it because our designs look like this,
where we're just trying to hack a little Roomba
when we first tried to tackle this problem
exactly five years ago.
But then pesky details with scale arise.
Like for starters,
just how much a hundred thousand dominoes is.
So the robot will need to come
and reload at least a thousand times.
But how exactly do you reload it?
And how would it know exactly where to drop each domino
and what color it should be?
And how do you make it so reliable that it doesn't screw up
once in a hundred thousand drops of a domino?
A system to reliably tackle issues at scales like this
is just going to be inherently super complex.
Like 10 times more complex
than my automatic bullseye dart board,
which to this point was probably the most complicated build
on my channel.
So after failing off and on for three years,
I was doing a Q and A at Maker Faire,
and I told the crowd if anyone wanted to help me
with the brutal challenge to hit me up afterwards.
And to my absolute delight, two freshmen from Stanford
and a software engineer from the Bay Area
all took me up on the challenge.
So I hired them and two years later, here we were.
Now, before I show you how it all works,
I first wanted to put him in a head-to-head competition
to see how good he really was.
And for that, we need the undisputed heavyweight champion
on YouTube for all things dominoes, Lily Hevesh.
Lily, you are known on YouTube
as the Queen of Dominoes, right?
- People do call me the Domino Queen.
- And for very good reason, with over 1.2 billion views
on her channel, you've almost certainly seen one
of her incredible creations over her 12 years
on the platform.
She's so good she's even got her own line
of dominoes you can buy in stores.
Okay, so here's the challenge, Lily,
I want you to set up like 300 dominoes right now
and let's see how long it takes a human to do that.
- Okay. - Okay?
Clock starts now.
- I gotta do two hands.
- If you need me, Lily,
I'm just sitting here reading my newspaper.
For you kids at home,
a newspaper is like a boring iPad made from trees.
(upbeat music)
(laughing) That's actually pretty fast.
- Oh no!
- Oh a disaster!
The foibles of being a human!
Okay, Lily, are you ready for this?
- No! - I've seen enough.
(blowing air through fingers)
I actually dunno how to whistle.
This is The Dominator!
- Oh my God, wow!
I love the eyes.
- A good set of googly eyes will go a long ways.
Okay, boy, let them down.
I suck at dominoes Lily, but I'm good at engineering.
Which means I'm actually really good at dominoes.
We even showed off!
The Dominator double stacked the middle row for you.
- That is impressive!
That is seriously impressive.
- This technique of laying down a tile of 300 dominoes
at once was really the key that helped us crack the scale
and reliability issues.
And it's probably my favorite part about The Dominator
besides his wiggly tail, of course.
Here's Josh to explain more.
- So we have these 3D printed funnels here
which allow us to drop all 300 dominoes all at once.
- And the mechanism that drops those into the top
of this tray, we'll show that in just a second.
- And if we remove these funnels here,
we can see that the dominoes are precisely placed
in their locations.
This allows us to place 300 dominoes exactly
where we want them all at once.
- And they don't fall out because of what we call
the Connect Four mechanism under here.
But if we trigger the servo,
then it slides that Connect Four tray over
and drops them all at once,
making for some gratuitous, beautiful slow-mo shots.
(upbeat music)
And so while this looks really cool,
obviously dropping from that height wouldn't be effective.
So we lower the whole platform down on this ball screw
then set them right on the floor,
which turned out to be incredibly reliable.
So Dom took the W in round one,
but now it's time for the endurance round.
Okay, first one to 10,000, dominoes wins.
Lily, you ready? - I'm ready.
- Dominator, you ready?
Start! (upbeat music)
- Oh my God.
Wow, I already failed.
- That's great. (upbeat music)
And to Lily's credit, she was actually insanely fast.
Just not, you know, robot fast.
- So unfair.
So unfair!
- On top of that, she had to handle a very large distraction
with the emotional maturity of a nine-year-old.
Yep, I think I'm doing pretty good.
(upbeat music)
You're doing very good for human, I'll give you that.
Oh, no!
(laughing)
(upbeat music)
No what?
No what, Lily? - Get out of here.
Nope, get out, get out!
(Mark yelling)
- That feels so much faster than it probably looks.
How's Lily doing?
- Tired!
- [Mark] And so while Lily's output
slowed down considerably, Dom's did not.
And I should mention we sometimes call him Dom,
but that's just short for his legal birth name,
which as noted before is Dominator.
'Cause you know, like domino, dominator.
Whatever, it all works.
- I'm gonna head to the bathroom.
- Oh, Lily has to go to the bathroom.
- I'm human, right?
Dominator, do you have to go to the bathroom?
Didn't think so.
9,000 perfectly laid dominoes
in a little over two hours, actually, 9,001.
We got a bonus domino out there in the middle of this field.
May or may not have been on purpose
but now we can say it's actually over 9,000.
It was a pretty clear result.
And Lilly, of course, was gracious in her defeat
to the machine overlords.
So all that was left to do now was to knock them down.
(dominoes clinking)
Yes, that was satisfying!
So we went head to head
with the world's foremost domino expert and came out on top.
And now it's time for the real challenge
to attempt a Guinness World Record
and see how quickly we could fill this entire room
with a mural of over a 100,000 dominoes.
All right, buddy, you got the game plan
now you just gotta get out there and execute.
Godspeed, little fella, godspeed.
(whimsical music)
300 dominoes down a hundred, 102,000 left to go.
♪ Enchante ♪ (upbeat music)
- So we're about six hours in, but more importantly,
we just got our first Goomba.
This is beautiful!
Back to work Dom.
And the best part about working really hard for a few years
is that the last 24 hours are super relaxing.
(upbeat music)
And with that tile placed we are officially halfway done
with over 50,000 dominoes put down
in just a little bit over 12 hours.
And Dom, whoa, easy boy,
just showing no signs of slowing down.
So this is a good point to explain the rest
of the robotic system.
It all starts over here with the loading station
that Josh and John-Luke spend a lot of time optimizing.
The dominoes are loaded by color on these conveyor belts
and then a KUKA robot arm grabs them
and places them in one of 300 loading shoots made
from 2.7 miles worth of hot wheel tracks.
And you could load Dom directly with the robot arm
but this is much faster because he doesn't have to wait.
He just comes in here to the docking station
and the lower platform slides over so the bottom layer
of 300 dominoes gets loaded up all at once.
And we also had a backup loading system using a tray just
in case at any point the robot arm wasn't working.
Besides the Hot Wheels tracks,
there's a ton of 3D printed parts throughout the build
that we either printed ourselves or if we were in a pinch,
my friends at MatterHackers helped us out.
So that's the loader.
Now how about The Dominator himself?
How does Dom know exactly where to go
in the room to drop a domino?
- So we've pre-programmed the route for all 102,000 dominoes
so the robot knows exactly where to go right from the start.
Then as we're driving around,
we use these indoor GPS sensors to track the position
of the robot so it knows roughly where it is.
And then as we get closer to the place
the dominoes need to drop,
we use these IR cameras that are tracking markers
on the ground to make sure the robot lines
up perfectly every single time.
- So the vision from the beginning is
that we could set Dom up, we could turn off the lights
and leave and come back the next morning,
and you've got like a full field of dominoes set up.
- He could work all night in the dark, just fine.
- All right, now how about these super cool wheels?
- So these are called omni wheels and they're awesome
because they let you translate it any direction you want.
So this is way better than like your car,
where if you need to move a little bit to the left or right
you have to make like a five point turn.
So with these guys, you can move any direction you want
to adjust for small corrections in the placement
of the dominoes.
These wheels are powered by these ClearPath brushless
DC servo motors.
These are like the gold standard
in terms of speed and accuracy,
and they allow us to slide the robot around
by even just a couple millimeters at a time,
which is super useful when we're trying to make
real fine adjustments for placing the dominoes down.
- Now obviously that's just the uppermost tip
of the iceberg tip, but Dom's brain is over 14,000 lines
of code all from scratch.
So if you wanna go way deeper into the technical details
I'll put a link in the video description
where Alex put it all in one spot.
Now back to finishing the second half.
(upbeat music)
♪ Enchante ♪ (upbeat music)
So The Dominator has been running just under 24 hours
and this is a bit of a momentous tile here.
It's-a me, Mario!
(upbeat music)
102,300 dominoes are on the floor successfully.
This is the last 300.
I think this is a moment, you guys get back over here.
Josh and Alex, let's observe it.
Don't blow this Dom.
You got it buddy, finish strong.
(dominoes clinking)
We got it!
Just over 24 hours to lay all the dominoes, gentlemen.
So now with everything set up
the final critical step was to knock them down.
You can see John loading in the Mario pipes
because they were gonna be our trigger mechanism.
The way that works is we've got four Hot Wheel cars glued
to the bottom of this platform
that rides in these parallel Hot Wheels tracks.
Then you slap a green sliding shell on top
and a motor at the end pulls the cart along the tracks
with a string.
Then the shell contacts the lever arm
at each pipe like this, which causes them to roll forward,
down the ramp, hopefully into the dominoes.
Okay, now I'm nervous.
I wasn't nervous.
Now I'm nervous.
Okay, 3, 2, 1, go.
(motor whirring) (dominoes clinking)
Yes, yes!
Three! (dominoes clinking)
Four! (dominoes clinking)
Five! (dominoes clinking)
- Oh my gosh! (dominoes clinking)
(Dom beeping happily) (dominoes clinking)
(build team cheering)
- Yes! - Awesome!
- Holy cow! - Whoa.
- Oh my gosh!
And in the end, Dom was 50 times faster
than a skilled domino builder,
and he got himself a world record to show for it.
Although, to be fair to us organisms,
it was in the non-human category.
And at that point, after five years
we were just so relieved to be done.
We got a little carried away celebrating the champ
with an appropriate sendoff.
(upbeat music)
What do we do now?
- Build a robot to clean it up.
- Ah, there we go!
A cleanup robot.