Ex-NASA Engineer Builds Record-Breaking Domino Robot In Five Years

Mark Rober, a NASA engineer turned YouTuber, is known for a variety of entertaining undertakings, like making glitter bombs to stop thieves and setting up a 'Ninja Warrior' course to keep nut-stealing squirrels at bay.

In his most recent video, he explains how he and his team created the perfect domino stacking machine by building an autonomous robot with a high-speed arm and laying down a half-mile of Hot Wheels tracks (800 m). In the end, the robot was 50 times faster than a skilled domino builder, so they got themselves a world record in the non-human category after five years of work between three people which has now been boiled down to a 15-minute video.

If the video doesn't satisfy your curiosity about the robot, you can read this blog post for more technical information on a couple of the system's components. Moreover, all of the software is also available on Github.