A domino robot dubbed Dominator has registered itself in the Guinness Book of World Records by creating a Super Mario Bros mural in just 24 hours. Developed by YouTuber and former NASA engineer Mark Rober, the robot took more than five years to make. He took help from two Stanford University freshmen and a Bay Area software engineer in developing the robot.
The group programmed over 14,000 lines of code and fitted the robot with components such as omnidirectional wheels and 3D-printed funnels to make a “friendly robot that’s super good at only one thing: setting up a butt-ton of dominos really, really fast.”
Placing 300 dominos at once
The Dominator has the ability to place 300 tiles at once, which is around 10 times faster than a human. It took the robot around two hours to place over 9,000 dominos. While the Dominator is the face of the project, a lot of its functionality is possible due to the mechanism that features a Kuka robotic arm and around three miles of Hot Wheels tracks.
Conveyor belts carry the dominions by color before the Kuka arm deposits them in the right chute. When the robot visits the station to refill, the lower platform moves away to load the robot’s 3D-printed funnels with 300 dominos that are needed to be placed at once.
Beats humans by a huge margin
To put things in perspective, it would take a team of seven skilled domino builders a week to recreate what Dominator has done in 24 hours.
Recently, researchers from the University of Maryland have developed a 3D-printed soft robotic hand that can play Nintendo’s 1980s iconic Super Mario Bros game. Soft robotics includes new types of flexible or inflatable robots that are powered by air or water rather than electricity. The team 3D-printed robot parts with integrated fluidic circuits in one shot, enabling the agility of the robot to play the game.
