Tech

Watch this robot turn 100,000 dominoes into a Super Mario Bros. mural

YouTuber, Mark Rober spent five years devising a robot that can line up 100,000 dominoes in 24 hours.

Automation is coming for us all, and one of the most recent dominos to fall in the march toward mass robotification is, well...

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Dominos

In a feat of engineering and video content creation, YouTuber Mark Rober recently unveiled a record-breaking robot capable of stacking 100,000 dominoes in 24 hours — a pace that would take seven skilled builders about a week.

For good measure, the aforementioned dominoes form a massive Super Mario Bros. mural.

50X

That's 50 times faster than a human domino builder.

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Rober even upped the ante by pitting his bot, aptly dubbed “The Dominator” against one of YouTube’s foremost domino builders, Lily Hevesh, who was (spoiler alert) unsurprisingly no match for a machine built specifically for this one task.

It’s hard to describe in words just how impressive Dominator is, but for context, it’s worth noting that it took Rober, and eventually a team of three student engineers, two of which attend Stanford University, a full five years to devise the bot and system capable of flawlessly executing the build.

The system includes not only Dominator, but a robot arm that sorts and readies dominoes to be carted away as well as coded instructions on where to grab the dominoes, exactly where to drop them, and which colors need to be loaded.

Just as satisfying as watching Dominator successfully complete its epic task of stacking 100,000 dominoes is the inevitable conclusion. To knock the stacks down, Rober devised a track using Hot Wheels cars that propels green pipes towards the pieces one by one.

The result speaks for itself

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