This is a video of Mark Rober discussing and demonstrating the five-years-in-the-making robot he and his team built that’s capable of setting up a record-breaking 100,000 dominos in 24 hours. For reference, it takes an experienced team of seven a full week to set up the same number of dominos, and that’s assuming I don’t find out about it and knock it all over on Wednesday. The whole thing is incredibly well designed, and the robot, which drops 300 dominos at a time, is refilled via a hopper that uses a high-speed robotic arm (and 2.4 miles of Hot Wheels track) to load the appropriate dominos in the appropriate holes to create the mural while the robot is dropping off its current payload. It makes its way around the room on its omnidirectional wheels via a preprogrammed route and a system of indoor GPS sensors and IR cameras to make sure it’s exactly where it’s supposed to be at any moment. Pretty wild. As wild as I get on Friday nights? Not by a long shot — I party every weekend like I just turned 21. “Last Friday he fell asleep before the pizza was even delivered.” Honey! “What?” I was saving my energy for late night. “You mean when you woke up and ate two cold slices and fell asleep again?” My back hurts.
beautiful slow motion footage of the mechanism dropping the dominos at 4:20