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.