Mark Rober, an engineer and YouTuber, has built a robot that makes domino murals at lightning fast speed. He has posted a video showing it creating a Super Mario Bros. themed mural with 100,000 dominoes in less than 24 hours. Rober estimates that it would take seven people a week to accomplish the same task.The robot, called the Dominator is able to do this by dropping 300 dominoes at once. These are then loaded by another robot. Rober explains in the video that the Dominator's current version is the result of years of hard work by him and his team. He also shows some of the failed designs that lead to the final product.If Mark Rober's name rings a bell, that could be because we have covered his past exploits. These include a glitter-powered device to deter porch pirates and a giant Super Soaker. A dart-tracking dartboard was also featured. Three other people worked with him to build and code the robot. He also recruited Lily Hevesh, a domino artist and YouTuber to play the role of the Dominator's human opponent (a la Ken Jennings or Brad Rutter playing Jeopardy against IBMs Watson). Watch her video to see how it feels to be a skilled at domino-laying to take on the robot.It was very difficult to solve the problem of the last centimeter.Robers video briefly explains the robots construction. However, there are a series blog posts by the team that provide extensive detail about everything, from the idea to the prototype to the robot to how it works, as well as how software and hardware work. The robot's navigation is one of the most interesting parts. It uses GPS for most of its operations, but it took a lot more trial and error to get the robot to align the dominoes correctly. After trying out several other options, the team decided to use a marker system and camera to solve the "last centimeter problem".The video's most rewarding part is the 100,000 dominoes being thrown down. This task required engineering work and the prop that Mario was inspired by is delightful. It's an amazing experience to see a long-running project come together. While this robot is not capable of delivering pizza or complex household tasks, it can stack dominoes with ease.
