- 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.
