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 gon na 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 gon na attempt a guinness world record and he's gon na try and fill this entire warehouse with a mural of a hundred thousand dominoes and for context setting up a domino mural that size would take a team of seven skill builders one full week. Dom here is gon na 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 have 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 a hundred thousand 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 a hundred thousand 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 the 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, okay, clock starts.

Now i got ta 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. That's actually pretty fast, the foibles of being a human okay lily. Are you ready for this 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 them down i suck at domino's 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 allow 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 4 mechanism under here. But if we trigger the servo, then it slides that connect4 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 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 ten thousand dominoes wins lily. You ready, i'm ready, dominator, you ready start! Oh my god wow i already fell that's great and to lily's credit. She was actually insanely fast. Just not you know, robot fast, so unfair, 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, that feels so much faster than it probably looks, how's lily, doing tired, and so, while lily's output slowed down considerably, doms did not, and i should mention we sometimes call him dom, but that's a short for his legal birth name which, as noted Before is dominator because you know like domino dominator whatever it all works, i'm gon na 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? Nine thousand perfectly laid dominoes in a little over two hours.

Actually, 9001. 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 him 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 could fill this entire room with a mural of over a Hundred thousand dominoes all right buddy, you got the game plan. Now you just got ta get out there and execute godspeed little fella, godspeed 300 dominoes down 102 000 left to go so 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 john luke 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 shoots 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. You can work all night in the dark, just fine all right now how about these super cool wheels. So these are called omni wheels and they're awesome because they let you translate it 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 to 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 motor.

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, 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 see 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.

It feels really fulfilling as an engineer to see the design process yield results like this and speaking of the engineering design process. My month-long creative engineering course, where i teach this process and where you watch me make three builds from scratch and you make three creative builds of your own is once again open for enrollment for a bonus summer session right now, so go to monthly.comrober or use the Link in the video description and i'll see you in class, so now, with everything set up, the final critical step was to knock him 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 card 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 five! Oh my god got it.

Yes, awesome holy cow, 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. Six-Year-Old me would be so stoked to know that i would eventually build a robot that could set up all the dominoes for me. So if you want the same feeling of making things with your hands to do cool things, but you don't want to wait 35 years, then my friends at kiwiko have got the answer.

In fact, this is an actual mini version of the dom i designed together with them. Just for this video i mean how awesome and adorable is that he's like the protege, the dom jr they've got an incredible team of designers that work on each project and, honestly, if i wasn't making youtube videos, i think i would apply to be on their team. Then all the concepts are kid tested and then it's delivered right to your door every month. So you can foster your creativity and make your abilities in a fun and natural way.

So, for example, for this domino machine box inside you've got all the supplies. You'll need to put it together. You've got simple instructions and then a booklet with more info like a q, a with someone you might know - and this is the tinker crate line, but they've got eight different subscription lines, each catering to a different age group and topic. So if you want to support my channel and feed your brain while having fun at the same time, go to cubico.com roverdomino or use the link in the video description to get an exclusive offer.

So, thanks to kiwico for being so great to work with thanks to dom and dom jr for just dominating, of course, thanks to you for watching what do we do now we're about to clean it up? Oh there we go a cleanup robot, you.