- 4 days ago
Mark Rober's Crunchlabs - Season 2 Episode 5 - My Domino Robot Broke A World Record
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00This is Dom. He's a friendly little robot that's super good at only one thing, setting up a butt-ton
00:06of dominoes really, really fast.
00:08It's taken five years to get to this point, but according to our initial tests, we have hopes that he
00:13might 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, and he's going to try and fill this entire warehouse with
00:28a 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
00:36week.
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. Because as a kid, you might have had a toy that
00:44looked like this.
00:45Or even this custom robot KiwiCo maybe that can drop 20 dominoes in a row.
00:49So isn't it a bit overkill to utilize an autonomous robot, a half mile of Hot Wheels tracks, and a
00:55high-speed robotic arm?
00:56And I get it, because our designs look like this, where we would just try and hack a little Roomba
01:01when we first tried to tackle this problem exactly five years ago.
01:04But then pesky details will scale arise, like for starters, just how much 100,000 dominoes is.
01:11So the robot will need to come and reload at least a thousand times, but how exactly do you reload
01:18it?
01:18And how would it know exactly where to drop each domino, and what color it should be?
01:22And how do you make it so reliable that it doesn't screw up once in 100,000 drops of a
01:28domino?
01:28A system to reliably tackle issues at scales like this is just going to be inherently super complex.
01:34Like 10 times more complex than my automatic bullseye dartboard, which to this point was probably the most complicated build
01:41on my channel.
01:41So after failing off and on for three years, I was doing a Q&A at Maker Faire, and I
01:46told the crowd if anyone wanted to help me with a brutal challenge, to hit me up afterwards.
01:50And to my absolute delight, two freshmen from Stanford and a software engineer from the Bay Area all took me
01:56up on the challenge.
01:57So I hired them, and two years later, here we were.
01:59Now before I show you how it all works, I first wanted to put him in a head-to-head
02:03competition to see how good he really was.
02:05And for that, we need the undisputed heavyweight champion on YouTube for 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, you've almost certainly seen one of her incredible creations over her
02:2512 years on the platform.
02:26She's so good, she'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, and let's see how long it takes a human
02:37to do that.
02:37Okay.
02:38Okay.
02:39Clock starts.
02:41Now.
02:43I gotta do two hands.
02:46If you need me, Lily, just sitting here reading my newspaper.
02:50For you kids at home, a newspaper is like a boring iPad made from trees.
02:57That's actually pretty fast.
03:01Oh, no.
03:02Oh, a disaster.
03:04The foibles of being a human.
03:07Okay, Lily, are you ready for this?
03:10I've seen enough.
03:12I actually don't know how to whistle.
03:15This 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.
03:27Okay, boy.
03:28Let them down.
03:30I suck at dominoes, Lily, but I'm good at engineering, which means I'm actually really good at dominoes.
03:39We even showed off.
03:41The dominator double stacked the middle row for you.
03:44That is impressive.
03:45That is seriously impressive.
03:47This technique of laying down a tile of 300 dominoes at once was really the key that helped us crack
03:52the scale and reliability issues.
03:54And it's probably my favorite part about the dominator.
03:56Besides his wiggly tail, of course.
03:58Here's Josh to explain more.
04:00So we have these 3D printed funnels here, which allows us to drop all 300 dominoes all at once.
04:04And 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.
04:21But if we trigger the servo, then it slides that Connect 4 tray over and drops them all at once,
04:27making for some gratuitous, beautiful slow-mo shots.
04:42And 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
04:51out to be incredibly reliable.
04:53So Dom took the W in round 1, but now it's time for the endurance round.
04:58Okay, first one to 10,000 dominoes wins.
05:01Lily, you ready?
05:03I'm ready.
05:04Dominator, you ready?
05:07Start.
05:12Oh my god.
05:13Wow.
05:14I already failed.
05:15That'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
05:38-old.
05:39Yep.
05:40I think I'm doing pretty good.
05:46You're doing very good for a human.
05:48I'll give you that.
05:50Oh no.
05:51Oh no.
05:54Oh no.
05:57Oh no.
05:58Oh no.
05:58Get that out of here.
05:59Get out, get out.
06:04That feels so much faster than it probably looks.
06:07How's Lily doing?
06:09Tired.
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
06:17name, which as noted before, is Dominator.
06:20Because, you know, like, Domino, Dominator, whatever.
06:24It all works.
06:25I'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 laid dominoes in a little over two hours.
06:43Actually, 9,001.
06:45We 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
06:57machine overlords, so all that was left to do now was to knock him down.
07:06Yes, 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
07:16how quickly we can fill this entire room with a mural of over 100,000 dominoes.
07:22All right, buddy, you got the game plan.
07:24Now you just got to get out there and execute.
07:28Godspeed, little fella.
07:29Godspeed.
07:36Three hundred dominoes down, 102,000 left to go.
07:41Enchanté.
08:04So we're about six hours in, but more importantly, we just got our first goomba.
08:10This is beautiful.
08:11Back to work, Dom.
08:15And 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 dominoes put
08:30down in just a little bit over 12 hours.
08:33And Dom, whoa, easy boy, just showing no signs of slowing down.
08:38So 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 dominoes 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 he doesn't
09:01have 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 dominoes 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
09:12arm wasn't working.
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
09:21us 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 dominoes so the robot knows exactly
09:34where to go right from the start.
09:35Then, as we're driving around, we use these indoor GPS sensors to track the position of
09:39the robot so it knows roughly where it is.
09:41And then as we get closer to the place the dominoes need to drop, we use these IR cameras
09:45that are tracking markers on the ground to make sure the robot lines up perfectly every
09:48single time.
09:49So the vision from the beginning is that we could set Dom up, we could turn off the lights
09:52and leave, and come back the next morning and you've got like a full field of dominoes
09:56set 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
10:04you want.
10:04So this is way better than like your car where if you need to move a little bit to the
10:08left
10:08or right, you have to make like a five-point turn.
10:11So with these guys, you can move any direction you want to adjust for small corrections in
10:14the placement of the dominoes.
10:15These wheels are powered by these ClearPath brushless DC servomotors.
10:18These are like the gold standard in terms of speed and accuracy, and they allow us to slide
10:22the robot around by even just a couple millimeters at a time, which is super useful when we're trying
10:26to make real fine adjustments for placing the dominoes down.
10:28Now, obviously that's just the uppermost tip of the iceberg tip, but Dom's brain is over
10:3414,000 lines of code, all from scratch.
10:36So if you want to go way deeper into the technical details, I'll put a link in the video description
10:40where Alex put it all in one spot.
10:41Now back to finishing the second half.
11:13So the Dominator has been running just under 24 hours, and this is a bit of a momentous
11:19tile here.
11:23It's-a me, Mario!
11:32102,300 dominoes are on the floor successfully.
11:37This is the last 300.
11:39I think this is a moment.
11:41You guys, get back over here.
11:43Josh and Alex, let's observe it.
11:46Don't blow this, Dom.
11:47You got it, buddy.
11:48Finish strong.
12:00We got it!
12:01Just over 24 hours to lay all the dominoes.
12:05Gentlemen.
12:07Now with everything set up, the final critical step was to knock him down.
12:11You can see John loading in the Mario pipes because they were going to be our trigger mechanism.
12:15The way that works is we've got four Hot Wheel cars glued to the bottom of this platform
12:19that rides in these parallel Hot Wheels tracks.
12:22Then you slap a green sliding shell on top, and a motor at the end pulls the cart along the
12:26tracks with a string.
12:27Then the shell contacts the lever arm at each pipe like this, which causes them to roll forward,
12:32down the ramp, hopefully into the dominoes.
12:35Okay, now I'm nervous.
12:37I wasn't nervous, now I'm nervous.
12:39Okay.
12:41Three, two, one, go!
12:47Yes, two, three, four, five!
12:57Oh my God.
13:21Oh my gosh.
13:31And in the end, Dom was 50 times faster than a skilled domino builder, and he got himself
13:36a world record to show for it.
13:37Although to be fair to us organisms, it was in the non-human category.
13:41And 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.
13:54What do we do now?
13:55We're about to clean it up.
13:57Oh, there we go.
14:00A clean-up robot.
Comments