Video jjpjjcMeujM

[00:00] This is the world's greatest goalkeeper, because it's a robot, and it's really, really fast. And this is Ronaldo, the world's greatest soccer player. Pre-seal, Ronaldo, Ronaldo, Ronaldo!

[00:14] The question becomes, what happens when the world's greatest player faces off against the world's greatest team? Woo! And even to get to this point, I had to survive the toughest of coaches. Don't cut the corners!

[00:27] The strongest of legs. Shut the door! A lot of failure and a little blood. Look at my hand. But all that started for me right here at the most iconic football stadium in the world when I was invited to play in the Sidemen charity match.

[00:41] And I came ready to play. Let's go. Mark. From the center of the 50th of the 90,000, my second favorite moment was when Steve tried to outspeed me.

[00:53] Because my first favorite moment was when I got to take a penalty kick and score a goal in front of 90,000 of my closest friends. Now, to say this was a dream of a lifetime would be an understatement.

[01:05] I've been playing soccer my whole life starting at five years old, and that's the kind of moment you only dream about as a kid. The problem was, now that I realized how good that felt, I couldn't take the idea that somehow I missed my life's calling

[01:18] to compete at the highest level with the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo. Now, normally, because I'm generally uncoordinated, when I need to compete at the highest level, I just rely on my brain, which means I know what it feels like to be a world-class whore,

[01:30] a world-class field goal kicker, that's my life! a world-class dart player, a world-class champion, domino lair, and golfer. And so while that was a reliable plan B, if I was ever going to have a chance to actually compete this sport with my raw athletic talent,

[01:45] this would be my best shot. So with the tears of Wembley still ringing in my ears, I made my way back to the pits to meet up with the one person I knew could prepare me for the debut of my professional career. The ghost of American soccer himself, Mark.

[01:58] What's up, bud? Landon Donovan. How we doing? And I cut right to it. Asking if there's anything I would first need to know before going pro. So you're training twice a day on the field. And then hour, hour 15 in the gym every day.

[02:11] After that, calf raises. 30 minutes a day you're at home, calf raises. Every time you're running, ball at your feet. Ball at your feet. All the time. What about your ice creams and your treats and your dessert? Lots of stretching.

[02:23] Pilates as well. Talking to a sports psychologist with your heart rate low while you're doing cutting. It's a spring chair. It's mobile. Running, jogging. Massage. Six more things. Choose right to stand before me. Oh, straight in my book.

[02:35] Oh. It's become an audio book? Yes, it sounds like a trigger. Let me see what we're working with. We started by running a five-year-old gauntlet to see if I have what it takes. Starting with the simple exercise of kicking a ball straight up in the air.

[02:47] Easy enough. Oh, boy. No. Every time you mess up, you've got to take a lap. Lap. Apparently this is a pretty common training technique for soccer Don't cut the corners! My bad!

[02:59] With every mistake meaning a full lap around the field Try again Oh, take a lap Drill number two was testing my aerial attack Where I had to practice hitting a ball lifted up to Ronaldo's max jump height at 9.5 feet

[03:12] Is it close? Must have been good, right? Lap That's hard Test three was the banana cake, just like this.

[03:25] Where we had to put spin on the ball to bend it into the net. Not bad? Not bad. Not good. Oh, I got it not good. I know, I know, I know. Laugh.

[03:37] Laugh, surprise. The next test involved speed and accuracy. So just like this. This one, we had to bomb a ball into the goal from halfway down the field. That's pretty. So I gave it a shot and actually made it pretty far.

[03:50] away from the neck. I was feeling optimistic about the final test because that was aiming at targets at a much closer distance. So I was pretty sure I was running my last lap.

[04:02] Don't cut the corner! Really cut! Alright Mark, more targets, more balls. I just had to hit the top right. Oh, oh. I hit the post. And then the top left. And then the bottom right.

[04:14] And the bottom left. Oh, is that even possible? I mean, you could have just said yes. Lap. Go.

[04:28] Corner! Like a foot, coach. I love the effort. I'd stick to science, bud. So with that resounding end to my professional soccer career, Thanks, Lion Man.

[04:41] It's time to start thinking like an engineer and initiate plan B. As after consulting with the team for a little brainstorm, this is plan B. If I want to be the best soccer player in the world, I'll first need to defeat the best soccer player in the world.

[04:53] In other words, I need to switch positions and make it impossible for Cristiano Ronaldo to score a goal on me by building the world's greatest goalkeeper. But there's a problem with that. Ronaldo kicks the ball at 80 miles per hour.

[05:05] So it'll reach the goal line in just a quarter of a second. That's a goal he's centered, and the maximum distance he has traveled is 12 feet. That means he'll need to lead himself to 40 miles per hour, then slam back on the brakes from zero, all within 250 milliseconds.

[05:17] That's literally half the time it takes to blink. In other words, how many really big motors? Bunky fancy cameras just crash the ball, so we can predict the trajectory for only a few milliseconds.

[05:29] For the fancy camera part, we got ourselves 12 high-speed infrared cameras. So while a normal camera sees me and Ian and anything else that's randomly in the background, those 12 cameras only see one thing.

[05:41] This soccer ball. And that's because if you look real close on the soccer ball, we've got these little gray stickers called retroreflectors. The surface is made up of tiny little glass spheres that bounce any light right back at the light source,

[05:53] like you see with those markers on the road or with road signs. So these cameras blast the scene with infrared light, and because they can only see infrared, the retroflexures glow super bright relative to everything else. So when you compare exactly where the center of the bright spot is in all 12 images,

[06:08] and then do some really complicated math, you get a 3D position of where the ball is down to the nearest millimeter 500 times per second. For us, that means 6 million seconds after being hit. We now have three data points that we can draw a line through to predict where the ball will end up.

[06:23] In other words, by the time Ronaldo's kick has traveled exactly this far, the goalie robot will already know exactly where it needs to be to block the shot. So we first needed to validate our tracking system by recording a kick that was faster than 70 miles per hour And apparently Ian got Coach Lennon scouting report because when I showed up there were two D1 soccer players already there to take the kick instead of just asking me

[06:44] Ian, I specifically remember telling you I can do that for you. I remember you saying that. I do. But I'm nothing if not a team player. So I volunteered to get in goal. I'm so confident not only am I going to block your shot, but I'm going to get at speed at the same time.

[06:56] Please don't hit me. Oh my God. I can't aim it away from you. Medic! Oh, that's bad. Look at my hand! But it would take a lot more than that to keep Mark Rober down.

[07:08] It's not about how many times you fall, it's about how many times you get up. So I cleaned my wounds and courageously stepped back in the line of fire. Let's see what you got! Sixty-six!

[07:20] That's not bad. Which was good, but not quite fast enough. We had to keep trying. No! Wow! Sixty-seven! Which I'm assuming will be good enough for the top comment, but not good enough for our top speed.

[07:36] Whoa! 71! We now have the data to verify our design would actually work, which meant we were finally ready for a 10-second go-frontage. This is one-to-one, no?

[08:00] Yeah, that's right. Here's how it works. Those cameras we talked about all plugs into a computer that figures out super quickly in real time where the ball is going to end up, and then it sends that answer to the pair of 50-horsepower motors right here and here.

[08:12] Then each of those motors is attached to a belt With our carriage amount of gold to the exact spot the ball will be Plus or minus the width of a human hair All that was left to do now To see if it actually worked

[08:24] Want to try to take a shot? Do you want to try and block a shot? Hands away from the keyboard Here we go Oh! Wow! Okay Mark Rover

[08:36] Better luck next time Mark Rover Now appreciate how tricky that is There is a ton of data with over 5,000 camera frames updating the goalie position real-time every second. The only problem was, this warehouse was basically in the middle of nowhere with zero internet.

[08:49] So I hit up my best seeds at T-Mobile, and they looked for stuff, which meant we were firing on all cylinders thanks to the best network in the U.S. For my second shot, I tried to get tricky with the off-speed kick. We're in the heat. Three, two, one.

[09:02] Wow. There's no fake ass. You're going to the panachea. Dang it. There's no fool in this guy. You want to go again? Finally, in frustration, I disinverted to raw power with a kick. I would make Coach Landon very proud.

[09:16] So while it wasn't yet perfect, it was certainly looking very promising, even if I'd already identified a couple weaknesses. Oh, hey, we weren't ready. Redo, redo. So to make sure we had truly worked out all the bugs before facing Ronaldo,

[09:29] we decided to gather real-world data by heading out to a local high school for some actual competition in the form of five shooters of increasing difficulty, culminating with the final boss, Detroit, a.k.a. the strongest leg on the Internet.

[09:41] We kick things off with what was certainly the most intimidating opponent to date. How fast can you kick? Really fast.

[09:53] Guess how fast Mark Ravis can move? How fast? That fast. That's faster. Mm-hmm. All right, fine, Bob. Do the honors. Oh, yeah!

[10:05] Better luck next time, Jonah! Okay. Now in hindsight, I do admit, my round one selling against Shodem might have been a bit extra. That's right. But regardless, it's gone to round two versus Tori.

[10:17] Alright Tori, what's your strategy? Corner. Which corner would you say? Left. She's going left! No. Tori, best of luck. Concentration. Oh, Tori!

[10:29] That was a good effort. Well played. And with two of six down, I think it's worth pointing out, now that we were out in the field, I once again asked T-Mobile for an internet hookup. And that's when they suggested, why don't you just run the entire robot on 5G? And I said, well, in order to stop Ronaldo, it would need to start moving in less than 10 milliseconds.

[10:44] And that's 1.40th the time it takes the Blink-1, so there's no way wireless can keep up with that. And they said, actually, it can! And I said, wow. And sure enough, it actually worked. So like before, the camera smooths the ball, but now when the computer picks up where it's going,

[10:56] that's when it'll fly through Google Pixel Rock in the 10th chip, ensuring super-fast 5G feeds wirelessly through the air, across T-Mobile's portable private 5G network straight into the robot, all in less than 10 milliseconds. Which means by the time your brain can even register the ball's moving,

[11:10] this robot has already moved to block it. Which is wild. Our third opponent, Kazushi, came in hot, making some very bold craze. How fast can you kick? Oh, like 70 miles an hour. Really? Kazushi, I'm going to ask you, now that I'm holding a radar gun,

[11:23] how fast can you kick a soccer ball? By 60. And they're just talking about placement. Alright Kabushi, let's see a 60 mile an hour blast. Ah shoot, let's go 55. Okay, 55.

[11:37] Oh wow, wow. Yeah! I'm done. Unfortunately, my goalie couldn't keep a clean sheet due to some accuracy issues. For the record, 50 more miles per hour. But failure is part of the process for our just-dose and graciously-dose-dose.

[11:52] Good night here Kabushi. She walks at two miles an hour, I know that. Our fourth kicker, Xenia, stepped up and just ripped a real beauty. Woo! Yeah! Let's go! How do you have saved up?

[12:04] No chance! Xenia, what the heck? You broke my left arm! That's my bad. I think it might have actually hit the post. Honestly, that's better than this one. I broke it. Xenia, get off my field!

[12:16] My robot's counterpart was definitely starting to fall apart. But my hope was he could keep it together for at least a few more saves. Are you a lefty deal? He's not even saying Oh, Mark, he's tricking you Just pull, Neo

[12:28] He's left No, he's right Neo Yeah, let's go Good save We got good news and bad news We blocked the shot But we seem to be losing material on each one It's like an apartment

[12:40] Neo This is for you Better luck next time, Neo Robot Mark Rober was on his last leg But there was no time to tend to wounds When the final box was waiting I've watched all these boys compete I've seen them do their things

[12:52] Yeah, but we've also been calibrating and learning ourselves. I know, but you haven't seen the leg like mine before. Oh, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho! Calibrate all you want! First video of yours I saw, you bombed what would have been like a 70-yard field goal? That's why it worked.

[13:04] I mean, the wind was. How you doing? I can see your shorts doing this. I've heard enough talk. Now I want to see the action. So I gave him three tries Simple rules that the free wind You not going to ask my strategy I don need to know your strategy You just kick it real hard You ready for this mark

[13:26] Right at me. Oh, come on. I want to catch the body, see what the body has. 65 miles an hour by the way. Not bad. I'm just warming up. Let's try to hit 70 right here. Oh, boy.

[13:40] He blocked it, though. I blocked it! I think it's hurt. You gotta stub him. I knew he shouldn't have used better glue. He broke his robot, bro. This man spent months designing this thing, doing this thing. He's bragging about carbon fiber dance,

[13:52] steel foam dance. I think we might require a goalie swap. So after a quick sub of my clinically injured keeper, it all came down to this. The final shot. And with the score tied, it was winner takes all. I think we need to move you closer.

[14:05] Closer? Robo goalie is optimized for the penalty kick. We'll see how optimized he is. All right. Let's go!

[14:19] And with an absolutely heroic effort, literally destroying himself to get an extra foot of reach, he made the save. Well, almost made the save. No!

[14:31] No! Optimize! So we have some strength issues. To be fair, I feel like the tracking is working well. Yeah? It's been there every time. But what do you think our chances are against Ronaldo? If you think the strength issues,

[14:44] I think you've got a pretty good shot against the goal. While these real-world tests were encouraging, it was clear we still had a bit more work ahead of us. Ronaldo kicks even harder than D, so we clearly need to level up the robot's strength and durability.

[14:56] I think he kicks hard. But even the speed and accuracy would need some work. For the strength issues, we knew from the beginning this would be a huge challenge, because it would stand an 80-mile-an-hour kick, and you could be really strong. But the bulkier and stronger something is,

[15:09] the harder it is to move it quickly. But it's a trade-off. Just like how it's harder for me to move this big, heavy bowling ball back and forth, versus this likely flimsy little ping pong ball. So to solve that, you just use an old trick I learned at NASA,

[15:21] where you sandwich a piece of dense foam between two sheets of carbon fiber. And now you've got something that's really lightweight, weighing less than a gallon of milk, and yes, it's also super strong.

[15:33] That's it, baby! But this solution had one critical oversight, an attachment point. When we looked at the footage in slow motion,

[15:45] it was clear before the ball even made contact, the damage had already been done. And that's because we had to pull so hard on the goalie to get it moving that fast, we were peering off the bracket and the whole back face in the process.

[15:58] So we reinforced the attachment of the bracket by adding four large diameter shear bolts and a carbon fiber crossmember. And once we ran a test to stimulate running the goalie with the old method versus the new method,

[16:11] yeah, it was clear this would make a huge difference. To solve the accuracy issues, we doubled the number of cameras to 22, which means we doubled the number of eyes looking for the ball stickers so we no longer had the issue where we sometimes would lose sight of the ball.

[16:25] And finally for the speed, we just pushed the motors to 250% of the standard power level, which doubled the robot's speed to 41 miles per hour. With all those fixes in place, it was time for one final test to think we were finally ready to face Cristiano Ronaldo.

[16:41] And the early indicator of 3G, yes we were. The brain is not meant to see things that large moving that fast. The trigger is here, get out of here now response. But just to be sure, we collected a few more data points.

[16:53] I think I'm really liking our chances. I think this is ready for the pros. And with that, let's go.

[17:05] We're off to Portugal. And... Did you get it? And it turns out Portugal's a beautiful country filled with really cool people. But unfortunately, we had no time to enjoy it, because we had only one day to prepare the face-off against their most famous countrymen.

[17:21] An out-of-the-gate disaster struck because once we got to the field and set things up, a Goli robot was basically missing every shot. Wait, did it move? No. But did you want to move?

[17:33] Yes. Oh, something is wrong. We couldn't get a good read on the ball position because there was so much noise in the tracking signal. And this is really confusing because we hadn't changed anything. I wonder what that noise is. It's so clean when we were in the city, right?

[17:46] I'm kind of surprised. I'm looking at sources of variability. And so as we step through all the sources of variability one by one, we looked at the graph of the ball position from all the cameras and zoom all the way in. The ball seemed to be wiggling up and down just a tiny bit about 1,500 times per minute,

[18:01] even though the ball itself was perfectly chill. And 1,500 wiggles per minute coincidentally was the same RPM frequency of an engine you would find in a forklift that happened to be moving all around our field for the previous three hours.

[18:15] And that meant the motor vibrations were traveling through the tires, through the ground, and ever so slightly wiggling all 22 of our cameras, causing this super delicate tracking system to basically be useless.

[18:27] And so as soon as we cleared out the forklift, sure enough, the signal cleaned up perfectly, and we got back to blocking shocks smooth as butter. For the most part. So while Ian stayed back to tackle that final bug in the code,

[18:42] I headed off to a Portugal World Cup qualifier game to do some last-minute recon on their star player before he would come over to meet our robot bully after the match. Now, to be honest, I didn't learn much about Ronaldo's kicking game,

[18:55] but I did learn that his fans are very loyal. Would you be really not subscribed for Ronaldo for me? Absolutely not. Because I'm only 5 million subscribers away from passing him on YouTube, and suffice it to say, no, no, no, absolutely no, no.

[19:10] I would not be getting myself any closer while in this country. But the good news is, I know of another country that has five times the population of this one, so do your thing, Argentina. Now, seeing that I was near hours away from the greatest showdown of my life,

[19:24] I headed back to the field to wait for Ronaldo to finish his game while I ran one final test. Because Hertz is a super complicated robot that took a year to build, but if you want to know what it feels like to build an epic robot of your own, well, you're in luck with Habitat,

[19:37] where you get a really cool robot in a box to live right to your door, and it'll work right away with no programming required, Unless you want to get creative, leveling up your robots' capabilities by tweaking the code, which we make really easy to do.

[19:49] Like with this desktop web that has its own personality It is plant that will drive itself around the house to find the perfect sunny spot as well as letting you know when it needs water But then if you just getting started on your journey of learning how to build anything

[20:01] you can dream up, in Kill Box you get a really fun mechanical toy each month where you build it alongside me and it gives you all the cool physics that make it work. On top of that, each month your box has a chance to contain the planet ticket, and if you get it, then you're coming out to Contra and build and play with my team today.

[20:17] If you're a kid and you're looking for something to put at the top of your Christmas list, or you're just looking to be the household hero, by giving this to someone else at EquestLabs.com, where we're giving away two free boxes for our holiday special,

[20:29] and where you'll find we finally completed our trilogy of creative engineering subscription box options, now raging from age 6 to 106. And now that the game was over, it was time to thank Cristiano Ronaldo, the greatest soccer player of all time, a legend on the field,

[20:44] and oh my gosh, he's right here tying his shoes right in front of me. All of a sudden, this was real, it was happening, and I had to show him that I'm in business. All right, Cristiano, I will bet you 5 million subscribers that you cannot score on me in goalie.

[20:58] I'll give you three tries even. That I don't score. Yeah, and you won't score. Okay. Let's go. Okay. Now, of course, I didn't think I was going to stop all of them, but considering my lifetime of soccer experience, I wondered if I had a shot at stopping one.

[21:13] I mean, you did Cristiano Ronaldo, but I've been training my whole life for this one. Oh, wow. Oh, that's not good. Okay, obviously I wasn't going to be able to block all of that. I'm not even wearing gloves.

[21:26] Or even two. That was like an inch gap. But now... Now I know yourself. I had a shot at getting one. Because I've been seeing Cristiano's form hitting both the left and the right.

[21:40] I had a chance to steady his body weight. to figure out which direction he was going to... Okay, I'm just saying. Really? Yeah. Oh, wow! You even told me!

[21:53] That's disappointing. Unlock? No. I actually have something else I want to show you over here. It was time to introduce Ronaldo to my guest of honor. In front of half the Portugal national soccer team he brought over with him.

[22:05] No biggie. All right, Christiana, when I said you couldn't score on me, I meant you couldn't score on my robot. And I held for applause, as did my robot. But Cristiano seemed less than impressed.

[22:17] It looks big, huh? Yeah, he's a little bigger than me. You want to see how fast he moves? Yeah. Okay, Ian, we good? Let's show him. Woo!

[22:31] Do it one more time. It's pretty bad. The robot is better than me. Let's try. Ronaldo was game. Here we go.

[22:43] I wanted to get started pretty far away from the goalie. No, I'm not sure. Eh, I can't say anything that was... Alright, Cristiano, we are ready. Okay. It was time for Ronaldo to face some cold hard engineering.

[22:55] Hey! Let me do another one just to see. In his first case, he didn't offer him up any clues. You have a strategy now, what do you think? We need to... I don't know. Let me try again.

[23:07] That was fast! I'm going to go with force. Go ahead. Oh!

[23:19] So is he better than me? Yes. Rinaldo kept trying to go at it full force, and quickly realized this was not going to be an easy fight. I like that you're stretching that. Yeah. On the bra. Right.

[23:32] But the only thing taking a beating, with Ronaldo standing amongst his teammates. I think it's out of my own. You keep going, you might tire him out, I don't know.

[23:47] I'm just kidding. Until he gently suggested, I shut my mouth. Oh! Which left quite an impression. Wow, that would have broken a nose. The Goli robot looked to be unbeatable, which was a huge relief.

[24:00] Because of shipping the robot over here, one of the carriage rails got slightly damaged, and this meant sometimes it would stop short of the goalposts on kick's place to the right. But thankfully, it didn't seem to be an issue after all.

[24:12] You think he could be on the Portuguese team? Yes, better than Diogo. It seemed like his theory was that the cameras were tracking his body to predict the ball direction before he kicked it.

[24:24] So he ran a simple test. Oh, Franco! The stutter! But then he seemed to have a new plan. The ball is a sensor. It's not the ball. The ball is a sensor.

[24:37] Because he stopped using his kicks to try and beat the robot, and started using his kicks to try and find a weakness. Oh! Oh! Oh! I'm trying to get in front now.

[24:50] Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Look at that little ball there. Look at that. Look at that. Oh! Oh! Look at that. OK. I'm getting nervous. Let me try again. OK. OK.

[25:03] Last one. I'm not going to have to do that. I used to move to get. Alright, let's go.

[25:33] The fun thing about lifelong dreams is they always involve a bunch of unexpected twists and turns on the pathway up the mountain that often end up being some of the best moments.

[25:46] And even when the view at the top isn't exactly what you first pictured, Thank you, buddy. Really appreciate it. It means you can now see a bunch more mountaintops you could potentially climb next.

[25:58] But those will have to wait for another video. Oh, that's nice, isn't it? Oh, that's... This holiday season, if you want to have a ton of fun while learning how to think like an engineer, now from ages 6 to 106, go to cluelaslabs.com,

[26:12] or you can link in the video description, where we're currently giving away two free boxes as a holiday special. Oh, and also, my friends at YouTube agree to give you 20% off if you use Google Shopping features like the product, link below this video, while discounted supplies last.

[26:30] Thank you.