All language subtitles for Mark.Robers.CrunchLabs.S02E05.My.Domino.Robot.Broke.a.World.Record.1080p.NF.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.H.264-WhiteHat_track3_[eng]

[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.