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.
- Cristiano Ronaldo! Ronaldo! Ronaldo!
- So the question becomes what happens when the world's greatest player faces off against the world's greatest keeper? - Woo! - Now to even get to this point, I had to survive the toughest of coaches.
- Don't cut the corner. - The strongest of legs. - Let's go!
- 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, and I came ready to play.
- Leftback. Mark! Biggest stage of football we can ever play.
90,000. - My second favorite moment was when Speed tried to outspeed me. - Great challenge from Mark Rober.
- Because my first favorite moment was when I got to take a penalty kick. - Rober! Yeah!
- 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. I've been playing soccer my whole life, starting at 5 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 shake the idea that somehow I'd missed my life's calling 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 bowler, a world-class field goal kicker. - That's my boy!
- World class darts player, jigsaw champion, domino layer, and golfer. And so while that was a reliable plan B, if I was ever gonna have a chance to actually compete in a sport with my raw athletic talent, this would be my best shot. So with the cheers of Wembley still ringing in my ears, I made my way back to the pitch to meet up with the one person I knew could prepare me for the debut of my professional career, the goat of American soccer himself.
- Mark, 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. - Okay, so you're training twice a day on the field. - Got it.
- And then an hour to an hour fifteen in the gym every day. - OK. - After that, Calf raises.
OK, 30 minutes a day, you're at home, calf raises. Every time you're running, ball at your feet, ball at your feet. Forget about your ice creams and your treats and your desserts.
Lots of stretching, yoga, that's pilates as well. Talking to a sports psychologist. Keep your heart rate low while you're doing all that.
It's cutting, it's sprinting. Keep your hips mobile. Running, jogging.
It's massage. 6 more things you - Could you just write this down for me. - Just read my book.
- Oh, does it come in audiobook? - Yes it does. - It does?
OK good. - Let me see what we're working with. - So we started by running a five drill gauntlet to see if I had what it takes.
Starting with the simple exercise of kicking a ball straight up in the air. - Easy enough. Oh boy.
- No, every time you mess up, you gotta take a lap. Lap. - What?
- Apparently this is a pretty common training technique for soccer. - Don't cut the corners! - My bad!
- With every mistake meaning a full lap around the field. - Try again. - Oh!
- Take a lap. - Ah! - Drll number two was testing my aerial attack where I had to practice heading a ball lifted up to Ronaldo's max jump height at 9.
5 ft. - Was it close? Must have been good, right?
- Lap. - Agh! Soccer's hard.
- Test three was the banana kick, - Just like this. - Where we had to put spin on the ball to bend it into the net. - Oh.
- Not bad. - I got a not bad. - Not good.
- I got a not good. I know, I know, I know. Lap.
- Faster please. - The next two tests 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. Away from the net.
- Oh! - Lap. - Dang it!
- But 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. - Don't cut the corner!
- I barely cut. - All right, Mark, four targets, four balls. - I just had to hit the top right.
- Oh, hit the post. - And then the top left, and then the bottom right and the bottom left. - Oh!
Is that even possible? I mean you could have just said yes. - Lap.
Let's go. Corner! - It's like a foot, Coach!
Ugh. - I love the effort. I'd, uh, I'd stick to science, bud.
- Oh. - So with that resounding end to my professional soccer career. - Thanks Landon.
- It was time to start thinking like an engineer and initiate Plan B. And so after consulting with the team for a little brainstorm, this was 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.
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.
So it will reach the goal line in just a quarter of a second. Now for a goalie centered, then the maximum distance he has to travel is 12 ft. That means he'll need to yeet himself to 40 MPH, then slam back on the brakes to 0, all within 250 milliseconds.
That's literally half the time it takes to blink. - In other words, I'm gonna need some really big motors and a bunch of fancy cameras to track the ball so we can predict the trajectory after only a few milliseconds. - 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, 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, whose surface is made up of tiny little glass spheres that bounce any light right back at the light source, 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 retroreflectors glow super bright relative to everything else.
So when you compare exactly where the center of the bright spot is in all 12 images, 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 milliseconds after being kicked. We now have 3 data points that we can draw a line through to predict where the ball will end up.
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 MPH. And apparently Ian got Coach Landon's scouting report because when I showed up there were two D1 soccer players already there to take the kick instead of just asking me.
- 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 gonna block your shot, but I'm gonna get it's speed at the same time. Please don't hit me. What have I done!
Medic! Look at my hand! - But it would take a lot more than that to keep Mark Rober down because 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. 66.
- That's not bad. - Which was good but not quite fast enough, so we had to keep trying. No!
Wow! 67! - Which I'm assuming will be good enough for the top comment, but not good enough for our top speed.
- 71! - We now had the data to verify our design would actually work, which meant we were finally ready for a 10 second build montage. - Well this is 1 to 1, no?
- Yeah, that checks. - Here's how it works. Those cameras we talked about all plug 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.
Then each of those motors is attached to a belt that whips our carriage-mounted goalie to the exact spot the ball will be plus or minus the width of a human hair. So all that was left to do now is to see if it actually worked. - You wanna try to take a shot?
- Do you wanna try and block a shot? Hands away from the keyboard. Here we go.
Oh wow, OK, Mark Rober. - Better luck next time, Mark Rober. - Now to appreciate how tricky that is.
There is a ton of data with over 5000 camera frames updating the goalie position in real time every second. The only problem was this warehouse was basically in the middle of nowhere with zero internet, so I hit up my besties at T-Mobile, and they hooked us up, which meant we were firing on all cylinders thanks to the best network in the US. For my second shot, I tried to get tricky with the off-speed kick.
- Bring the heat. - Three, two, one. Wow!
- There's no fake outs. - You coded the Panenka, dang it! There's no fooling this guy.
- You wanna go again? - Finally, in frustration, I just reverted to raw power with a kick that would make Coach Landon very proud. 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, 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 Deestroying, AKA the strongest leg on the Internet.
- What's good? - And we kicked things off with what was certainly the most intimidating opponent to date. - How fast can you kick?
- Really fast. - Well, guess how fast Mark Rober can move? - How fast?
- That fast. That's faster. All right, Science Bob, do the honors.
Better luck next time, Jonah. - OK. - Now in hindsight, I do admit my round one sully against Jonah might have been a bit extra.
- That's right. - But regardless, it's on to round two versus Tory. - All right, Tory, what's your strategy?
- Corners. - Which corner would you say? - Left.
- She's going left. - No! - Tory, best of luck.
The concentration. Tory! 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, and that's 1/40 the time it takes to blink once.
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 sees the ball, but now when the computer picks up where it's going, that signal flies through Google Pixel rocking the tensor chip, ensuring super fast 5G speeds 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 could even register the ball's moving, this robot has already moved to block it. Which is wild.
Our third opponent Kazushi came in hot making some very bold claims. - How fast can you kick? - Like 70 MPH.
- Really? Kazushi. I'm gonna ask again now that I'm holding a radar gun, how fast can you kick a soccer ball?
- Like 60. - Man, they just called your bluff. - All right, Kazushi, let's see your 60 mile an hour blast.
- Alright, actually like let's go 55. - Okay, 55. Oh wow!
Wow! - Yeah Let's go! - Unfortunately my goalie couldn't keep a clean sheet due to some accuracy issues.
- For the record, 54 MPH. - But failure is part of the process, so I took note and graciously moved on. - Get out of here, Kazushi.
He walks at 2 miles an hour. I know that. - Our 4th kicker Xenia stepped up and just ripped a real beauty.
- Yeah! Let's go! - How did that save that?
- 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 scoring.
I broke it. - Xenia, get off my field. - My robot 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, Neo? He's not even saying, oh, Mark, he's tricking you! - Let's go, Neo.
- He is left- No, he's right! - Let's go Neo! - Boo!
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. - You're falling apart, man. - Neo, this is for you.
That's a piece of me. 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 boss was waiting.
- I've watched all these boys compete. I've seen them do their thing. - Yeah, but we've also been calibrating and learning ourselves.
- I know, but you haven't seen a leg like mine before. Calibrate all you want! - First video of yours I saw, you bombed what would have been like a 70 yard field goal.
- Its light work. - The wind was a tailwind. - How do you know?
Were you there? - I can see your shorts doing this. I've heard enough talk.
Now I want to see the action. - So I gave him 3 tries. Simple rules.
Best of 3 wins. - You're not gonna ask my strategy. - I don't need to know your strategy.
You just kick it real hard. - See if you're ready for this Mark. - (laughing) - Right at me!
Oh, come on! - I wanna test 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. - Yeah, oh boy!
(laughing) - He blocked it though! - He blocked it! - But he's hurt.
You gotta substiute him. - I knew we should have used better glue. - I broke his robot, bro.
This man spent months designing this thing, building this thing. He was bragging about carbon fiber this, steel foam this. - I think we might require a goalie swap.
- So after a quick substitute of my critically injured goal 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.
- Closer? - Robo goalie is optimized for the penalty kicks. - Let's see how optimized he is.
- Alright. Let's go! - 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. - Optimized, huh? !
- 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 fix the strength issues?
I think he's got a pretty good shot against the GOAT. - 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.
- Dang it, 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 the goalie needs to be strong enough to withstand an 80 mile an hour kick, but the bulkier and stronger something is, 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 lightweight, flimsy little ping pong ball. - So to solve that, we just use an old trick I learned at NASA 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 yet. . .
. . .
it's also super strong. Abs baby. - But this solution had one critical oversight, our attachment point.
When we looked at the footage in slow motion, 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 peeling off the bracket and the whole back face in the process. So we reinforced the attachment of the bracket by adding 4 large diameter shear bolts and a carbon fiber crossmember, and once we ran a test to simulate running the goalie with the old method versus the new method 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've doubled the number of eyes looking for the ball stickers, so we no longer have the issue where we sometimes would lose sight of the ball. And finally for the speed, we just pushed the motors to 250% of the standard power levels, which doubled the robot's speed to 41 MPH. So with all those fixes in place, it was time for one final test to see if we were finally ready to face Cristiano Ronaldo.
And the early indicators pointed to yes, we were. - The brain is not meant to see things that large moving that fast. - It triggers your get out of here now response.
- But just to be sure, we collected a few more data points. - I think I'm really liking our chances. I think this is ready for the pros.
- And with that, let's go. We were off to Portugal. - Did you get it?
- And it turns out Portugal is 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 to face off against their most famous countryman. And out of the gate disaster struck because once we got to the field and set things up, our goalie robot was basically missing every shot. - Wait, did it move?
- No. - But did you want it to move? - 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 was really confusing because we hadn't changed anything. - I wonder what that noise is from, it was so clean when we're in the states, right?
- I'm kind of surprised. I'm looking at sources of variability. - And so as we stepped through all the sources of variability one by one, when we looked at the graph of the ball position from all the cameras and zoomed all the way in, the ball seemed to be wiggling up and down just a tiny bit, about 1500 times per minute, even though the ball itself was perfectly still.
And 1500 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 3 hours. 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 the super delicate tracking system to basically be useless. And so as soon as we cleared out the forklift, sure enough, the signal cleaned up perfectly and we got back to blocking shots smooth as butter.
. . .
. . for the most part So while Ian stayed back to tackle that final bug in the code, 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 goalie after the match.
Now, to be honest, I didn't learn much about Ronaldo's kicking game, but I did learn that his fans are very loyal. - Would you be willing to unsubscribe 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.
- I would not be getting myself any closer while in this country. But the good news is I know of another country that has 5 times the population of this one, so do your thing Argentina. Now seeing that I was mere hours away from the greatest showdown of my life, I headed back to the field to wait for Ronaldo to finish his game while I ran one final test.
Because this 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 Hack Pack where you get a really cool robot in a box delivered right to your door and it will work right away with no programming required, unless you want to get creative, levelling up your robot's capabilities by tweaking the code, which we make really easy to do. Like with this desktop lamp that has its own personality or this plant tank 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're just getting started on your journey of learning how to build anything you can dream up with Build Box, you get a really fun mechanical toy each month where you build it alongside me and I teach you all the cool physics that make it work. On top of that, each month your box has a chance to contain the platinum ticket, and if you get it. .
. . .
. then you're coming out to CrunchLabs to build and play with my team for a day. So 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 it to someone else, head to CrunchLabs.
com, where we're giving away two free boxes for our holiday special, and where you'll find we finally completed our trilogy of creative engineering subscription box options now ranging from ages 6 to 106. And now that the game was over, it was time to face Cristiano Ronaldo, the greatest soccer player of all time, a legend on the field, 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 meant business. - All right, Cristiano, I will bet you 5 million subscribers that you cannot score on me in goal. I'll give you 3 tries even.
- That I don't score? - Yeah, and you won't score. - OK.
Let's go. - OK. - Now, of course I didn't think I was gonna stop all of them, but considering my lifetime of soccer experience I wondered if I had a shot at stopping one.
I mean, he is Cristiano Ronaldo, but I've been training my whole life for this moment. - Oh. Oh wow.
Oh, that's not good. - OK, obviously I wasn't gonna be able to block all of them. - I'm not even wearing gloves.
- Or even 2. - That was like an inch gap. - OK.
- But now, - Now I know your tells. - I had a shot at getting one Because having seen Cristiano's form hitting both the left, and the right, I had a chance to study his body language to figure out which direction he was going to. .
. - Again, the same. - Really?
- Yeah. - Oh wow! You even told me.
That's disappointing. - One more? - 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, no biggie. - All right, Cristiano, 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.
- It looks big, huh? - Yeah, he's a little bigger than me. - Yeah.
- You want to see how fast it moves? - Yes. - OK, Ian, we good?
Let's show him. Do it one more time! - Very fast.
- It's really fast? The robot is better than me. - Oh let's try.
- Ronaldo was game. - Here we go. - I wanted to get started pretty far away from the goalie.
- You're too far away, get closer. - Oh yeah, I am still warming up. - All right, Cristiano, we are ready.
- OK. - It was time for Ronaldo to face some cold hard engineering. - Let me do that another one just to see.
- And his first kick didn't offer him up any clues. - Do you have a strategy now? What do you think?
- We need to. . .
I don't know. Let, let me try again. - That was fast.
- It will have to be force. - Oh! - So is he better than me?
- Yes. - Ronaldo kept trying to go out at full force and quickly realized this was not going to be an easy fight. - I like that you're stretching now.
- Yeah, the beating's coming. - But the only thing taking a beating was Ronaldo's standing amongst his teammates. - Do you want to try?
- Yeah if you don't score we will? - So I took a shot on my own. - If you keep going, you might tire him out.
I don't know. 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 goalie robot looked to be unbeatable, which was a huge relief because when shipping the robot over here, one of the carriage rails got slightly damaged, and this meant sometimes it would stop short of the goalpost on kick's place to the right. But thankfully. .
. it didn't seem to be an issue after all. - 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, so he ran a simple test. - Oh Panenka!
The stutter! But then he seemed to have a new plan. - This ball has a sensor.
It sees the center of the ball. - Because he stopped using his kicks to try and beat the robot and started using his kicks to try and find a weakness. - I'm going to try something different now.
- That had potential! - It's the little gap in the corner there. Got to try and put it there.
I hit it here. - Oh OK, I'm getting nervous. - Let me try again.
- OK, OK. - Last one. - Go to the top again.
- That's what I'm going to do. - All right, ready when you are. - The funny 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.
- This is some amazing stuff though. - And, and even when the view at the top isn't exactly what you first pictured - Thank you, buddy really appreciate it. - And very good, very good evening.
- it means you can now see a bunch more mountain tops you could potentially climb next, but those will have to wait for another video. - Jeez, these NASA people. .
. - 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 CrunchLabs. com or use the 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 agreed to give you 20% off if you use Google shopping features like the product links below this video, while discounted supplies last.
