After five years of development, Mark Rober, engineer and YouTube personality, along with a team of three engineering students have completed the development of a robot that's capable of precisely placing 300 dominos at once. Over the last few years, numerous advancements have taken robotics from mostly autonomous vacuums to devices capable of protecting doctors while helping contagious patients. Robots are also being tested by law enforcement agencies across the world, and companies like Amazon have spent years trying to sell customers and investors on fully autonomous delivery systems.
Some wild designs, like Toyota's CUE basketball robot, are starting to show how robots, while still quite limited in function, are being designed to perform some of the simpler aspects of the human experience. While CUE doesn't represent the end of human-led sports, it does show that companies like Toyota are serious about implementing AI in the future. However, robotics still remains to be a relatively niche area.
Rober began prototyping a domino-placing robot three years before recruiting an engineering team at MakerCon 2019. Documenting the development of the robot on the Baucom Robotics website, the initial prototypes had the robot placing the dominos down one at a time. Mark’s ultimate goal was to create a robot capable of placing 100,000 dominos, so the team began working on a funnel and tray system that would allow the robot to place hundreds of dominos at once. The robot also needed to accurately read its positioning when placing the dominos, and after a few iterations, the team used sensors with a custom marker tracking code to help the robot neatly align the dominos along with a pre-mapped configuration. The result of the build can be seen in the video below.
How Does It Keep Going?
With the design of the robot, dubbed the Dominator, finalized, the team had to set up a system capable of feeding dominos into the robot’s funnel and tray. Loaded by color, a robotic arm is programmed to swiftly place each domino into one of the 300 loading chutes built using 3D printed funnels and over two miles of Hot Wheels tracks. The robot arm continuously feeds dominos into the chutes, allowing Dominator to load up its tray without waiting at the station. With all this, the process of laying the dominos down is practically autonomous, after manually preparing a map for the Dominator to follow, which allowed Rober and the team to leave the robot to work by itself overnight.
Dominator was able to lay the dominos, coordinated to illustrate the start screen of the Super Mario Bros. NES game, in a little over 24 hours. It's an impressive feat of engineering, one that thankfully does not try to pass through the uncanny valley to endear people to a robot. If the Dominator is guilty of anything, it is being a champion at laying dominos.
Sources: Mark Rober/YouTube, Baucom Robotics