Mark Rober unveils his latest creation, the Dominator. This robot was designed for one specific purpose, arranging dominoes as fast as possible, and this former NASA engineer (worked on Curiosity rover at JPL) enlisted the help of two Stanford University freshman to help program the machine. In all, it took over 14,000 lines of code in addition to the 3D-printed funnels, custom components, and most importantly, omni-directional wheels.
Just how fast is this robot? Well, Mark pitted it against professional domino artist Lily Hevesh and let’s just say that Dominator was about 10-times faster, since it is capable of arranging 300 tiles simultaneously, or roughly 9,000 dominoes in 2-hours. One hardware component that helps immensely is the Kuka robotic arm and a conveyer belt system consisting of Hot wheels tracks that feeds the dominoes to the sorter. For those wondering, it does use GPS for navigation, but actually aligning the dominoes took lots of trial and error before the team settled on a camera, paired with a marker system.
- The console is also decorated with images of recognizable characters: Tom Nook and Nooklings Timmy and Tommy
- Includes a Switch console, Switch dock, Joy-Con (L) and Joy-Con (R), and two Joy-Con strap accessories
- Game not included
