A robot arranges 100,000 dominoes in a mural from Super Mario Bros. in one day

Engineer and YouTuber Mark Rober created a robot that can make domino murals at lightning speed, and showed it with a video of the arrangement of 100,000 dominoes in a Super Mario Bros.– thematic mural in just over 24 hours. Rober says it would take a team of seven humans a week to do the same.

The robot, named the “Dominator”, achieves this by dropping 300 dominoes at a time – which are, of course, loaded into it by another robot. Rober says in the video that the current version of the Dominator is the culmination of years of work by him and his team, and he explains how the device actually works, as well as some of the failed designs that led to the final product. .

If Mark Rober’s name rings a bell, maybe it’s because we’ve covered some of his exploits in the past, from a glittery device meant to deter porch pirates, to a Super Giant Soaker, a Dart Tracking Dart Board and a moving basketball hoop. A team of three other people helped him build the robot and code the software. He also enlists domino artist and YouTuber Lily Hevesh to act as the Dominator’s human opponent (a la Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter playing IBM’s Jeopardy vs. Watson). You can watch his video to see what it’s like for someone skilled at laying dominoes to take on the robot.

Image: Mark Rober

Rober’s video briefly touches on building the robot, but there is a series of blog posts written by the team that go into immense detail on everything from how the project went from idea to to the prototype, to the robot, how software and hardware work, and more. One of the more interesting sections is about the robot’s navigation – it uses GPS for the most part, but it turns out getting the robot to line up the dominoes correctly without knocking over any in the process took a lot of time. trial and error. The team ended up using a camera and marker system to solve what they called “the last centimeter problem,” after testing a few other options.

Image: Baucom Robotics

Of course, one of the most satisfying parts of the video is seeing the 100,000 dominoes overturned – a task that also required some engineering work and delightfully uses a Mario-themed prop. It’s a joy to see a multi-year project like this come to fruition, and while this particular robot may not be able to perform complex household chores or deliver pizza (although if it does could, it’s obvious which channel it would work for), it can absolutely stack dominoes with the best of them.