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 dominoes 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 going to 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 going to attempt a Guinness World Record, and he's going to try and fill this And for context, setting up a domino mural that size would take a team of seven skill builders one full week. Dom here is going to 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've had a toy that looked like this, or even this custom robot KiwiCo maybe 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 would just try and 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 100,000 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 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 10 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&A at Maker Faire, and I told the crowd if anyone wanted to help me with a 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 Havish. 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. Clock starts... now. 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. That's actually pretty fast. Oh, no! Oh, disaster! The foibles of being a human. Okay, Lily, are you ready for this? No. I've seen enough. 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. Okay, boy. Let him 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 allows 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. 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. Oh my god. Wow. I already pinned. That's great. And to Lily's credit, she was actually insanely fast. Just not, you know, robot fast. 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. You're doing very good for a human. I'll give you that. Oh no. Number one. Get out of here. Get out. 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. Because, you know, like Domino, Dominator, whatever. It all works. I'm going to 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 Lily, of course, was gracious in her defeat to the Machine Overlords, so all that was left to do now was to knock them 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 dominoes. Alright, buddy, you got the game plan. Now you just gotta get out there and execute. Godspeed, little fella. Godspeed. 300 dominoes down, 102,000 left to go. 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. 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 Jean-Luc spent 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 chutes 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. Alright, now how about these super cool wheels? So these are called Omni Wheels, and they're awesome because they let you translate in 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 want to 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. 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 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. 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 going to 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. Three, two, one, go! Yes! Two! Three! Four! Yes! Awesome! Oh! 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 send-off. What do we do now? We're about to clean it up. Oh, there we go! A clean-up robot.