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

skilled 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 tracks,

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 super 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 love 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 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 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.

So we're about six hours in

but more importantly,

We just got our first Goomba.

It's beautiful.

Back to work Dom.

And the best part of working

really hard for a few years,

is that the last 24 hours

are super relaxing.

And with that tile placed,

we are officially half way done.

With over 50,000 dominos put down,

and just a little over 12 hours.

And Dom, woah easy boy,

just showing no signs of slowing down.

So this is a good point

to explain the rest of the robotics system

It all starts over here

with the loading station that

Josh and John Luke spent a lot

of time optimizing.

The dominos are loaded by color

on these conveyer 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 Wheels 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 bottem

layer of 300 dominos gets loaded up

all at once.

And we also had a back up loading system

using a tray just incase 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 preprogramed the route for

all 102,000 dominos.

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 the place

where the dominos 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 was 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 dominos set up.

He could work all night in the dark

just fine.

Alright now how bout 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 dominos.

These wheels are powered by these

clear path, brushless DC server 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

a time,

which is super useful when we're trying

to make real fine adjustments for placing

the dominos 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 want to go way deeper into

the technical details I'll

put a link in the video's description,

where I'll just put it all in one spot.

Now back to finishing the second half.

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.

102,300 dominos are on the floor

succesfully.

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.

We got it.

Just over 24 hours,

to lay all the dominos.

Gentlemen

It feels really fulfilling as an engineer

to see the design prosses yield results

like this.

And speaking of the engineering

design prosses,

my month long creative engineering course

where I teach this process,

and where you watch me make three builds

from scratch, and you make

three creative builds of your own.

Is once again open for enrollment for

a bonus Summer session right now.

So go to

monthly.com/markrober

or use the link in the video description.

And I'll see you in class.

So now with everything set up,

the final step was to knock em down.

You can see John loading in the Mario

pipes because they were going to be our

trigger mechanism.

The way that works is we've got four

Hot Wheels 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 dominos.

Ok now I'm nervous.

I wasn't nervous, now I'm nervous.

OK

3

2

1

Go

Yes! Two!

Three!

Four!

Five!

Oh my gosh

Got em wooo!

Yes!

Awesome!

Holy cow!

Wooooaaah!

Oh my gosh

And in the end Dom was 50 times faster

than the 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 carried away

celebrating the champ with

an appropriate sendoff.

Six year old me would be so stoked

to know that I would eventually build

a robot that could set up all the dominos

for me.

So if you want the same feeling of making

things with your hands to do cool things,

but you don't want to wait 35 years.

Then my friends at KiwiCo have got

the answer.

In fact, this is an actual mini version

of the Dom I designed together with them

just for this video.

I mean how awesome and adorable is that.

He's like the protégé.

The Dom Jr.

They got an incredible team of designers

that work on each project and honestly

if I wasn't making YouTube videos

I think I would apply to be on their team.

Then all the concepts are contested

and then its delivered right to your door

every month,

so you can foster your creativity

and make your abilities in a fun

and natural way.

So for example this domino machine box,

inside you've got all the supplies

you need to put it together.

You've got simple instructions.

And then a booklet with more info

like a Q and A with someone you might know.

And this is the tinker crate line

But they've got eight different

subscription lines each catering to

a different age group and topic.

So if you want to support my channel

and feed your brain while having

fun at the same time,

go to kiwico.com/roberdomino

or use the link in the video description

to get an excusive offer.

so thanks to KiwiCo for being so great

to work with, thanks to Dom

and Dom Jr. for just dominating,

and of course thanks to you for watching.

What do we do now?

We're about to clean it up.

Oh there we go, a cleanup robot.