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00:00This is Dom. He's a friendly little robot that's super good at only one thing.
00:04Setting up a butt ton of dominoes really, really fast.
00:08It's taken five years to get to this point, but according to our initial tests,
00:12we have hopes that he might be more than ten times faster than the fastest human.
00:16So today we're going to put him to the test, going head-to-head against the world's foremost domino expert,
00:21who unfortunately is a mere human.
00:23Then we're going to attempt a Guinness World Record,
00:25and he's going to try and fill this entire warehouse with a mural of 100,000 dominoes.
00:30And for context, setting up a domino mural that size would take a team of seven skill builders one full week.
00:36Dom here is going to attempt to do it by himself in 24 hours.
00:40Now I know what you're thinking. Big whoop, Mark.
00:42Because as a kid, you might have had a toy that looked like this.
00:45Or even this custom robot KiwiCo maybe that can drop 20 dominoes in a row.
00:50So isn't it a bit overkill to utilize an autonomous robot,
00:53a half mile of Hot Wheels tracks, and a high-speed robotic arm?
00:56And I get it, because our designs look like this,
00:59where we would just try and hack a little Roomba when we first tried to tackle this problem exactly five years ago.
01:04But then pesky details will scale arise.
01:07Like, for starters, just how much 100,000 dominoes is.
01:11So the robot will need to come and reload at least a thousand times.
01:15But how exactly do you reload it?
01:18And how would it know exactly where to drop each domino,
01:21and what color it should be, and how do you make it so reliable
01:24that it doesn't screw up once in 100,000 drops of a domino?
01:28A system to reliably tackle issues at scales like this
01:32is just going to be inherently super complex.
01:34Like, ten times more complex than my automatic bullseye dartboard,
01:38which to this point was probably the most complicated build on my channel.
01:42So after failing off and on for three years,
01:44I was doing a Q&A at Maker Faire,
01:46and I told the crowd if anyone wanted to help me with the brutal challenge,
01:49to hit me up afterwards.
01:50And to my absolute delight,
01:52two freshmen from Stanford and a software engineer from the Bay Area
01:55all took me up on the challenge.
01:57So I hired them, and two years later, here we were.
02:00Now before I show you how it all works,
02:01I first wanted to put him in a head-to-head competition
02:03to see how good he really was.
02:05And for that, we need the undisputed heavyweight champion on YouTube
02:09for all things dominoes, Lily Havish.
02:12Lily, you are known on YouTube as the queen of dominoes, right?
02:16People do call me the domino queen.
02:18And for very good reason.
02:19With over 1.2 billion views on her channel,
02:22you've almost certainly seen one of her incredible creations
02:24over her 12 years on the platform.
02:26She's so good,
02:28she's even got her own line of dominoes you can buy in stores.
02:31Okay, so here's the challenge, Lily.
02:32I want you to set up like 300 dominoes right now,
02:35and let's see how long it takes a human to do that.
02:37Okay.
02:38Okay.
02:39Clock starts now.
02:43I gotta do two hands.
02:45If you need me, Lily,
02:48I'm just sitting here reading my newspaper.
02:50For you kids at home,
02:51a newspaper is like a boring iPad made from trees.
02:57That's actually pretty fast.
03:01Oh, no!
03:03Disaster!
03:04The foibles of being a human.
03:06Okay, Lily, are you ready for this?
03:09No.
03:10I've seen enough.
03:11I actually don't know how to whistle.
03:14This is the dominator.
03:18Oh, my God.
03:21Wow.
03:22I love the eyes.
03:23A good set of googly eyes will go a long ways.
03:26Okay, boy.
03:27Okay, boy.
03:28Let them down.
03:29I suck at dominoes, Lily, but I'm good at engineering, which means I'm actually really good at dominoes.
03:38We even showed off.
03:40The dominator double stacked the middle row for you.
03:43That is impressive.
03:44That is seriously impressive.
03:47This technique of laying down a tile of 300 dominoes at once was really the key that helped us crack the scale and reliability issues.
03:53And it's probably my favorite part about the dominator.
03:56Besides his wiggly tail, of course.
03:58Here's Josh to explain more.
03:59So we have these 3D printed funnels here, which allow us to drop all 300 dominoes all at once.
04:03And the mechanism that drops those into the top of this tray, we'll show that in just a second.
04:08And if we remove these funnels here, we can see that the dominoes are precisely placed in their locations.
04:13This allows us to place 300 dominoes exactly where we want them all at once.
04:17And they don't fall out because of what we call the Connect 4 mechanism under here.
04:20But if we trigger the servo, then it slides that Connect 4 tray over and drops them all at once, making for some gratuitous, beautiful slo-mo shots.
04:33And so while this looks really cool, obviously dropping from that height wouldn't be effective.
04:46So we lower the whole platform down on this ball screw, then set them right on the floor, which turned out to be incredibly reliable.
04:53So Dom took the W in round one, but now it's time for the endurance round.
04:58Okay, first one to 10,000 dominoes wins.
05:01Lily, you ready?
05:02I'm ready.
05:03Dominator, you ready?
05:07Start.
05:12Oh my god.
05:13Wow.
05:14I already failed.
05:16That's great.
05:23And to Lily's credit, she was actually insanely fast.
05:26Just not, you know, robot fast.
05:30So unfair.
05:32So unfair.
05:33On top of that, she had to handle a very large distraction with the emotional maturity of a nine-year-old.
05:40Yep, I think I'm doing pretty good.
05:42You're doing very good for a human.
05:46You're doing very good for a human.
05:48I'll give you that.
05:50Oh no.
05:51Oh no.
05:53Oh no.
05:58Get that out of here.
05:59Get out, get out.
06:01That feels so much faster than it probably looks.
06:07How's Lily doing?
06:08Tired.
06:09And so while Lily's output slowed down considerably, Dom's did not.
06:13And I should mention, we sometimes call him Dom, but that's just short for his legal birth name,
06:17which as noted before, is Dominator.
06:20Because you know, like Domino, Dominator, whatever.
06:24It all works.
06:24I'm going to head to the bathroom.
06:26Oh, Lily has to go to the bathroom.
06:30I'm human, right?
06:32Dominator, do you have to go to the bathroom?
06:34Didn't think so.
06:399,000 perfectly late Domino's in a little over two hours.
06:43Actually, 9,001.
06:46We got a bonus Domino out there in the middle of this field.
06:49May or may not have been on purpose, but now we can say it's actually over 9,000.
06:53It was a pretty clear result, and Lily, of course, was gracious in her defeat to the machine overlords.
06:58So all that was left to do now was to knock him down.
07:04Yes, that was satisfying.
07:08So we went head to head with the world's foremost Domino expert and came out on top.
07:12And now it's time for the real challenge, to attempt a Guinness World Record and see how
07:17quickly we can fill this entire room with a mural of over 100,000 Domino's.
07:22All right, buddy, you got the game plan.
07:24Now you just got to get out there and execute.
07:27Godspeed, little fella.
07:29Godspeed.
07:34Godspeed.
07:36300 Domino's down, 102,000 left to go.
07:40Enchanté.
07:42So we're about six hours in, but more importantly, we just got our first Goomba.
07:56This is beautiful.
08:10Back to work, Dom.
08:13And the best part about working really hard for a few years is that the last 24 hours are
08:19super relaxing.
08:23And with that tile placed, we are officially halfway done with over 50,000 Domino's put
08:30down in just a little bit over 12 hours.
08:33And Dom, whoa, easy boy, just showing no signs of slowing down.
08:39So this is a good point to explain the rest of the robotic system.
08:41It all starts over here with the loading station that Josh and John Luke spent a lot of time
08:46optimizing.
08:46The Domino's are loaded by color on these conveyor belts, and then a KUKA robot arm grabs
08:50them and places them in one of 300 loading chutes made from 2.7 miles worth of Hot Wheel
08:56tracks.
08:57And you could load Dom directly with the robot arm, but this is much faster because
09:00he doesn't have to wait.
09:01He just comes in here to the docking station and the lower platform slides over so the bottom
09:06layer of 300 Domino's gets loaded up all at once.
09:08And we also had a backup loading system using a tray just in case at any point the robot arm wasn't
09:13working.
09:13Besides the Hot Wheels tracks, there's a ton of 3D printed parts throughout the build that
09:17we either printed ourselves or if we were in a pinch, my friends at Matterhackers helped us out.
09:22So that's the loader.
09:23Now how about the Dominator himself?
09:25How does Dom know exactly where to go in the room to drop a Domino?
09:29So we've pre-programmed the route for all 102,000 Domino's so the robot knows exactly where to go
09:34right from the start.
09:35Then, as we're driving around, we use these indoor GPS sensors to track the position of the robot so it
09:40knows roughly where it is and then as we get closer to the place the Domino's need to drop,
09:44we use these IR cameras that are tracking markers on the ground to make sure the robot lines up
09:47perfectly every single time.
09:48So the vision from the beginning is that we could set Dom up, we could turn off the lights and leave
09:53and come back the next morning and you've got like a full field of Domino's set up.
09:56You could work all night in the dark just fine.
09:58All right, now how about these super cool wheels?
10:00So these are called Omni wheels and they're awesome because they let you translate it any direction you want.
10:04So this is way better than like your car where if you need to move a little bit to the left or right,
10:09you have to make like a five point turn.
10:10So with these guys you can move any direction you want to adjust for small corrections in the
10:14placement of the Domino's.
10:15These wheels are powered by these ClearPath brushless DC servo motors.
10:18These are like the gold standard in terms of speed and accuracy and they allow us to slide the
10:22robot around by even just a couple millimeters at a time which is super useful when we're trying to
10:26make real fine adjustments for placing the Domino's down.
10:28Now obviously that's just the uppermost tip of the iceberg tip but Dom's brain is over 14,000 lines of code,
10:35all from scratch. So if you want to go way deeper into the technical details,
10:38I'll put a link in the video description where Alex put it all in one spot.
10:41Now back to finishing the second half.
10:43I'll see you then.
10:51I'll see you then.
10:55Bye.
10:57Bye.
10:59Bye.
11:01Bye.
11:03Bye.
11:04Bye.
11:07Bye.
11:09so the dominator has been running just under 24 hours and this is a bit of a momentous tile here
11:20it's a me mario
11:26102 300 dominoes are on the floor successfully this is the last 300
11:38i think this is a moment you guys get back over here josh and alex let's observe it
11:46don't blow this dom you got it buddy finish strong
11:49we got it just over 24 hours to lay all the dominoes gentlemen
12:06so now with everything set up the final critical step was to knock him down you can see john
12:12loading in the mario pipes because they were going to be our trigger mechanism the way that works
12:16is we've got four hot wheel cars glued to the bottom of this platform that rides in these
12:20parallel hot wheels tracks then you slap a green sliding shell on top and a motor at the end pulls
12:26the cart along the tracks with a string then the shell contacts the lever arm at each pipe like
12:30this which causes them to roll forward down the ramp hopefully into the dominoes okay now i'm nervous
12:36i wasn't nervous now i'm nervous okay three two one go
12:44yes yes two three one
12:55one
12:57oh my god
13:05oh my gosh
13:18and in the end dom was 50 times faster than a skilled dominoes okay so i'm nervous i'm nervous
13:20i'm nervous i'm nervous i'm nervous i'm nervous i'm nervous i'm nervous i'm nervous i'm nervous
13:25wow oh my gosh and in the end dom was 50 times faster than a skilled domino builder and he got
13:36himself a world record to show for it although to be fair to us organisms it was in the non-human
13:40category and at that point after five years we were just so relieved to be done we got a little
13:45carried away celebrating the champ with an appropriate send-off
13:48what do we do now we're about to clean it up oh there we go a cleanup robot
14:18what's up oh there you go a setup
14:20buddy
14:21buddy
14:21buddy
14:22buddy
14:23buddy
14:24buddy
14:25buddy
14:26buddy
14:28buddy
14:31buddy
14:32buddy
14:33You
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