The engineer and YouTuber Mark Rober created a robot who can make domino murals at lightning speed and showed it with a video in which he organizes 100,000 tiles in a Super Mario Bros themed mural. in just over 24 hours. Rober says a team of seven would take one week to do the same thing. Below we present the official video.
The robot who created the Super Mario Bros. mural
The robot, called “Dominator“, Achieves this by knocking down 300 dominoes at a time – which are, of course, loaded by another robot. In the video Rober reveals who the current version of the Dominator is the culmination of years of work by him and his team and delves into the operation of the device, as well as showing some of the failed projects which led to the final product.
Helping him build the robot and code the software was a team of three people. He also enlisted the domino artist and YouTuber Lily Hevesh.
Rober’s video talks briefly about the construction of the robot but on his blog you can find many posts written by the team that go into detail. They explain how the project went from the idea, to the prototype, to the robot, how the software and hardware work and much more.
One of the most interesting sections concerns the navigation of the robot, which uses GPS. However Rober revealed that making sure that the robot aligns the dominoes correctly without dropping them in the process it took a lot of trial and error.
The team ended up using one camera it’s a marker system to solve what he called “the last inch problem”, after testing a few other options.
Of course, one of the most satisfying parts of the video is seeing the 100,000 dominoes being knocked down. It is a task that also required a little bit of engineering work and delightfully making use of a Mario themed prop. If you are curious to know more, you can consult the official website.