World Record Domino Robot (100k dominoes in 24hrs)

This is Dom.

He's a friendly little robot

that's super good at only one thing.

Setting up a butt-ton of dominos

really really fast.

It's taken five years to get to this point

but according to our initial tests,

we have hopes that he might be more than

ten times faster than the fastest human.

So today we're gonna put him to the test

going head to head against he 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 hundred thousand dominos.

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

twenty dominos in a row.

So isn't a bit overkill to utilize

an autonomous robot,

a half mile of Hot Wheels track,

and a high speed robotic arm?

And I get it because our designs

look like this where we were just trying

to hack a 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

100,000 dominos is.

So the robot will need to come and reload

at least 1,000 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 100,000 drops of a domino?

A system to reliably tackle issues

at scales like this is just going to be

inherently complex.

Like ten times more complex

than my automatic bullseye dartboard,

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 Makerfaire

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 just 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 dominos,

Lily Hevesh.

Lily, you are known on Youtube as

The Queen of Dominos 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 dominos

you can buy in stores.

Ok, so here's the challenge Lily.

I want you to set up like 300 dominos

right now and let's see how long it takes

a human to do that.

Ok.

Clock starts,

Now.

I got to do two hands.

If you need me, Lily,

just sitting here reading my newspaper.

For you kids at home a newspaper is like

a boring ipad made from trees.

That's actually pretty fast.

Oh no.

Disaster, the foibles of being human.

Ok Lily are ready for this?

No.

I've seen enough.

(Failure to whistle)

I actually don't know how to whistle.

This, is the Dominator.

Oh my god

Wow

I lve the eyes.

A good set of googly eyes will go

a long ways.

Ok boy, let em down.

I suck at dominos, Lily,

but i'm good at engineering which means

I'm actually really good at dominos.

We even showed off

the Dominator doubled-stacked

the middle row for you.

That is impressive,

that is seriously impressive.

This technique of laying down

a tile of 300 dominos at once

was really the key that helped us crack

the scale and reliability issues.

And its probably my favorite part about

the Dominator,

besides his wiggly tail of course.

Here's Josh to explain more.

So these 3D printed funnels here,

which allow us to drop all 300 dominos

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 dominos are

precisely placed in their locations.

This allows us to place 300 dominos

exactly where we want them all at once.

And they don't fall out because of what we

call the Connect 4 mechanism under here.

But if we trigger the servo,

then it slides that Connect 4 tray over

and drops them all at once

making for some gratuitous, beautiful

slow-mo shots.

And so while this looks very 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.

Ok, first one to 10,000 dominos wins.

Lily, you ready?

I'm ready.

Dominator, you ready?

Start

Oh my god

Wow

I aready failed.

That's great.

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 emotional maturity

of a 9 year old.

Yep, I think I'm doing pretty good.

You're doing very good for a human

I'll give you that.

Oh no

Woah

No what, no what Lily

Get out, Get out

Aaaaaahhh

That feels so much faster than

it probably looks.

How's Lily doing?

Tired.

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 dominos in a little

over two hours.

Actually 9,000 and 1,

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 that it's over 9,000.

It was a pretty clear result

and Lily, of course, was gracious

in her defeat to the machine overlords.

So all that was left to do now,

was to knock em down.

Yes! That was satisfying.

So we went head to head against

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 can fill

this entire room with a mural,

of over 100,000 dominos.

Alright buddy,

you got the game plan,

now you just got to get out there

and execute.

Godspeed little fella, Godspeed.

300 dominos down, 102,000 left to go.