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Watch This Robot Build a Super Mario Bros. Mural Using 100,000 Dominos

The 'Dominator' can stack up to 300 dominos at once.

 & Chance Townsend Contributing Writer

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How long does it take to set up 100,000 dominos? According to engineer and YouTube Mark Rober (pictured above), a group of seven skilled builders would need a week. But with his latest robotic creation, Rober took that build time down to 24 hours and crafted an impressive Super Mario Bros.-inspired mural.

Known as the Dominator, the robot can stack up to 300 dominos at once; they're loaded up with the help of another robot. Rober, a former NASA and Apple engineer who now has 19.3 million YouTube subscribers, built the Dominator with the help of two Stanford University students and Bay Area software engineer Alex Baucom over the course of five years. Consisting of 2,400+ 3D printed parts and programmed with more than 14,000 lines of code, the Dominator’s only goal is to set up dominos as fast as possible. 

Its efficiency comes from a separate sorting mechanism that consists of a Kuka robotic arm and almost 3 miles of Hot Wheels tracks, Rober explains in the video. As The Verge notes, you can find the full details on Baucom's website; the software is also on Github.

After all that work, the team knocked down the Mario mural—with the help of some Hot Wheels and a green shell from the world of Mario.

If you want to try your hand at some mini-Dominator action, Rober teamed up with Kiwi for a Domino Machine Tinker Crate, which will set you back $25.

About Our Expert

Chance Townsend

Chance Townsend

Contributing Writer

Chance Townsend got his start at PCMag as an editorial fellow in summer 2021, and is now a freelancer. He's a grad student at the University of North Texas, and his favorite time of the day is unlimited mimosa brunch. He's in front of a computer screen most of the time, but when he isn't, he's either in the kitchen or out at his local park feeding the ducks.

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