Domino Robot: From Domino Day Records to ABB Arms

A domino robot sets up dominoes so people can get to the part they enjoy, which is knocking them down. On 2 October 2026, 10,000 boxes of pasta formed a 1.7-kilometre chain reaction through the Vaughan Mills shopping centre before going to the Vaughan Food Bank. Steve Price of Sprice Machine and his team built it. This post follows domino toppling from the first public shows and Domino Day to home-built laying machines and Mark Rober's record-setting domino robot, and looks at where ABB robots could fit.

Hands setting up long curving lines of coloured dominoes on white boards. Photo: Pauloleong2002 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From one-man shows to Domino Day

Domino toppling became a show in the 1970s. Bob Speca Jr. of Broomall, Pennsylvania, organised the first public domino shows, and in 1976, at 18, he set a record by toppling 11,111 pieces. In 1979 Michael Cairney, a British engineer, set a Guinness record with 169,573 dominoes in Poughkeepsie, New York. Klaus Friedrich of Germany was the last person to set a new world record on his own, in 1984, and after that the records took teams. Toy makers joined in too: Pressman Toys sold Domino Rally, with tiles and mechanical devices for building toppling displays.

A line of dominoes falling over. Photo: Kurt:S / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Domino Day turned the hobby into television. The first edition ran on 28 August 1998 in Leeuwarden in the Netherlands, organised by Endemol Netherlands with Weijers Domino Productions of Robin Paul Weijers, known as Mr. Domino. In 2006 a team of 90 builders took around two months to set up 4.4 million stones. In 2007, 85 builders from 12 countries placed 4.5 million. During the preparations for Domino Day 2005, a sparrow was shot inside the Frisian Expo Centre in Leeuwarden. The record came in 2009, when 4,491,863 stones fell. The last show aired on 13 November 2009. A 2020 edition was announced and then postponed, and no new date has been set.

The sparrow shot on 14 November 2005 in the Frisian Expo Centre in Leeuwarden during preparations for Domino Day 2005, photographed in 2017. Photo: Magere Hein / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Makers started building machines to do the setting up. In 2009 Matthias Wandel built a domino-laying machine out of LEGO, and in 2017 he made a wooden version that uses one motor both to move along and to push each domino into place. In 2019 a maker known as gzumwalt showed a 3D-printed machine driven by a single small DC motor, and found along the way that there is no real standard size for dominoes. In 2021 Lewis of DIY Machines built one run by an Arduino Uno, with a carousel that holds up to 130 dominoes and a layout that can be programmed or steered over Bluetooth.

An Arduino Uno board, the kind of controller that runs the DIY Machines domino layer. Photo: JrawX / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Domino robots and fast pick and place today

The best-known domino robot came from Mark Rober, the former NASA engineer and YouTuber, who built it with John Luke, Josh and Alex Baucom. Rober had been toying with the idea for a few years and mentioned it in a talk at the 2019 Bay Area Maker Faire. The robot, called the Dominator, rides on three omnidirectional wheels driven by servo motors and carries a tray that holds and releases 300 dominoes at a time. A Raspberry Pi 4 steers it, using a Marvelmind indoor positioning system and a downward-facing infrared camera that looks for reflective markers on the floor.

A Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, the computer that steers the Dominator. Photo: Laserlicht / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In 2021 the Dominator laid 102,600 dominoes in 24 hours for a Super Mario Bros. mural, a Guinness World Record. Feeding it took a second machine: a conveyor brings dominoes of different colours to an industrial KUKA robot arm, which drops them down a grid of tubes that can hold several layers at once. Alex Baucom released all the code on GitHub. Rober also put the robot up against domino artist Lily Hevesh, who could not match its speed by hand, although her creative designs are still hard for a machine to beat.

Domino artist and YouTuber Lily Hevesh, 2024. Photo: Amaury Laporte / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

That loading station is a classic pick and place job, the kind ABB built its delta robots for. ABB calls the IRB 360 FlexPicker the fastest industrial delta robot in the world and sells it in versions for payloads of 1 to 8 kg. Its TrueMove and QuickMove motion control lets it track fast-moving conveyor belts, and ABB's PickMaster software sets up the vision. One Conveyor Tracking Module links up to four robots, four conveyors and eight cameras, the setup our conveyor tracking lessons cover. Loading domino magazines with a FlexPicker is a possibility; we found no such project.

A FlexPicker cell set up with ABB's PickMaster Lite software. Photo: ABB

Where domino robots could go next

For homes, the maker machines show the direction. Hobbyists have built domino layers from an Arduino and 3D-printed parts, and the DIY Machines design can be programmed with a layout in advance. Precision is the hard part. The Dominator needed an indoor positioning system and a floor camera just to know where it was, and every piece has to go down without nudging the last one. Creating large domino displays is nerve-racking, Hackaday noted, because bumping a single domino can mean starting from scratch.

An OR gate built from dominoes: push either bottom domino and the top one falls. Photo: Lord Belbury / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Big public builds are the other market. Domino Day needed 90 builders for two months, and Steve Price's pasta chain at Vaughan Mills ran for 1.7 kilometres. A robot that lays the straight runs while people build the tricky sections could save days on projects like these. Classrooms are another place. ABB sells a Robotics Education Package for schools, colleges and universities that includes a GoFa cobot and teaching materials, and a GoFa, which can be guided by hand and set up with graphical apps, could lay out a domino demonstration for a class. Both are possibilities for now.

A teacher and students at an ABB Robotics Education Package cell with a GoFa cobot. Photo: ABB

Cost and safety are the open questions. The Dominator took a team of four, custom tracking and a separate industrial robot to feed it. Any arm that works on a crowded show floor also needs to be safe around people. ABB says its GoFa uses torque sensors to limit power and force and can share a workspace without fencing, and a layout could be planned first in RobotStudio before a single domino is placed.

Moving an ABB GoFa arm by hand, the way a position is taught without writing code. Photo: ABB

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