Original subtitles

[Mark] This is Dom.

He's a friendly little robot that's supergood 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 tests,

we have hopes he might be more than ten times faster

than the fastest human.

We're gonna put him to the test,

head-to-head against the world's foremost domino expert,

who unfortunately is a mere human.

Then we'll attempt a Guinness World Record,

and he's gonna try and fill this entire warehouse

with a mural of 100,000 dominoes.

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.

I know what you're thinking. "Big whoop, Mark."

Because as a kid, you might've had a toy like this,

or even this custom robot KiwiCo made me that can drop 20 dominoes in a row.

So isn't it overkill to utilize an autonomous robot,

a half mile of Hot Wheels tracks,

and a high-speed robotic arm?

I get it, because our designs looked like this,

where we'd just 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 going to be inherently super complex.

Like, ten times more complex than my automatic bull's-eye dartboard,

which to this point was probably the most complicated build on my channel.

After failing off and on for three years,

I was doing a Q&A at Maker Faire

and told the crowd if anyone wanted to help me with a brutal challenge,

to hit me up afterwards.

To my absolute delight,

two freshmen from Stanford and a software engineer from the Bay Area

took me up on the challenge.

So I hired them, and two years later, here we were.

Before I show you how it works,

I wanted to put him in a head-to-head competition

to see how good he really was.

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.

[Mark] And for very good reason.

With over 1.2 billion views on her channel,

you've almost certainly seen 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.

Here's the challenge, Lily.

I want you to set up 300 dominoes right now.

Let's see how long it takes a human to do that.

-Okay. -[Mark] Okay?

Clock starts… now.

[intriguing music plays]

I gotta 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.

[chuckles] That's actually pretty fast.

[music stops]

-Oh no! The middle of the field. -[Mark] Disaster.

The foibles of being a human.

-Okay, Lily, are you ready for this? -No.

I've seen enough.

[attempts to whistle]

I don't know how to whistle.

This

is the Dominator.

-[Mark laughs] -Oh my God.

Wow.

I love the eyes.

[Mark] A good set of googly eyes will go a long ways.

Okay, boy,

let 'em down.

I suck at dominoes, Lily,

but I'm good at engineering, which means…

-I'm actually really good at dominoes. -No!

[Mark laughs] We even showed off.

The Dominator double-stacked the middle row for you.

That is impressive.

That is seriously impressive.

[Mark] This technique of laying down a tile of 300 dominoes at once

was the key that helped us crack the scale and reliability issues.

It's probably my favorite part about the Dominator,

besides his wiggly tail, of course.

Here's Josh to explain more.

We have these 3D printed funnels

which allow us to drop all 300 dominoes at once.

And the mechanism that drops those into the top of this tray,

we'll show that in a second.

[Josh] And if we remove these funnels,

we see that the dominoes are precisely placed in their locations.

This allows us to place 300 dominoes where we want 'em all at once.

[Mark] They don't fall out because of what we call the Connect Four mechanism.

But if we trigger the servo, it slides that Connect Four tray over

and drops them all at once,

making for some gratuitous, beautiful slo-mo shots.

[chilled-out music plays]

While this looks really cool,

dropping from that height wouldn't be effective.

So we lowered 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?

[Dominator clicks]

Start.

[Lily] Oh my God. Wow.

-I already failed. -[Mark] That's great.

To Lily's credit, she was actually insanely fast,

just not,

you know, robot fast.

So unfair.

So unfair.

[Mark] On top, she had to handle a large distraction

with the emotional maturity of a nine-year-old. [chuckles]

Uh, yep, I think I'm doing pretty good.

You're doing very good for a human, I'll give you that.

Oh no.

[both laugh]

-No what? No what, Lily? -[Lily] Get that out of here. No. Get out.

Agh!

That feels so much faster than it probably looks.

-How's Lily doing? -Tired.

[Mark] So while Lily's output slowed down considerably,

Dom's did not. I should mention, we sometimes call him Dom,

but that's 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.

[music stops]

Nine thousand 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 over 9,000.

It was a clear result.

And Lily, of course, was gracious in her defeat to the machine overlords.

All that was left to do now was to knock 'em down.

-[chuckles] Yes! That was satisfying. -Whoo!

[Mark] We went head-to-head with the world's foremost domino expert

and came out on top.

Now 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.

All right, buddy, you got the game plan. Now just get out there and execute it.

[jaunty music plays]

Godspeed, little fella. Godspeed.

Three hundred dominoes down,

102,000 left to go.

♪ Enchanté ♪

♪ Enchanté ♪

[Mark] So we're about six hours in, but more importantly,

we just got our first Goomba.

It's beautiful!

Back to work, Dom.

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.

This is a good point to explain the robotic system.

It all starts over here with the loading station

that Josh and John Luke spent a lot of time optimizing.

Dominoes are loaded by color on 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.

You could load Dom directly with the arm,

but this is faster. He doesn't have to wait.

He just comes to the docking station and the lower platform slides over

so the bottom layer of 300 dominoes gets loaded up all at once.

We had a backup loading system using a tray

just in case 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 from the start.

As we're driving around, we use these indoor GPS sensors

to track the position of the robot so it knows where it is.

As we get closer to the place the dominoes need to drop,

we use IR cameras that are tracking markers on the ground

to make sure the robot lines up every time.

So the vision is that we could set Dom up,

turn off the lights and leave, come back the next morning

and you've got a field of dominoes set up.

-He could work in the dark just fine. -[Mark] How about these super cool wheels?

[Alex] These are omni wheels. They're awesome.

They let you translate it any direction.

This is way better than your car,

where if you need to move a little to the left or right,

you have to make a five-point turn.

With these, you can move any direction

to adjust for small corrections in the placement.

These wheels are powered by ClearPath brushless DC servo motors.

These are the gold standard in terms of speed and accuracy.

They allow us to slide the robot around by even a couple of millimeters,

which is super useful when we're trying to make fine adjustments.

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.

If you want to go into the technical details,

I'll put a link in the description where Alex put it in one spot.

Back to finishing the second half.

[jaunty music plays]

♪ Enchanté ♪

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.

-[music stops] -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.

With everything set up,

the final critical step was to knock 'em down.

You can see John loading the Mario pipes. They were gonna 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 slap a green sliding shell on top,

and a motor at the end pulls the cart along the tracks with a string.

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. -[chuckling]

[Mark] I wasn't nervous. Now I'm nervous. Okay.

Three, two, one, go.

-Yes! Two. -[Alex] Oh.

Three.

Four.

Five.

Oh my gosh.

[Dom beeps]

Got it! Whoo!

Yes!

-That is awesome. -Oh!

Holy cow.

Whoa.

Oh my gosh.

In the end, Dom was 50 times faster than a skilled domino builder,

and he got a world record to show for it.

Although to be fair to us organisms, it was in the non-human category.

At that point, after five years, we were so relieved to be done,

we got carried away celebrating the champ

with an appropriate send-off.

-What do we do now? -A robot to clean it up.

Oh! There we go.

A cleanup robot.