Would suit me. I get a blade 2 all over every 6 weeks.
I always wanted to setup super cheap kiosk-based hair cutting (I was going to call it RyanHair), but I basically felt the clippers were going to be stolen all the time.
I wonder how many people get a similar, clippers only, non-styled, hair cut.
I remember when I played football in middle school, we had a maximum hair length of 2 inches (and couldn't touch your ear or shirt collar), so we pretty much all just got 0/2 fades or buzz cuts every month from one of the teammates mom for $5.
Wasn't a bad business. She made $150-200 in a single day in a couple of hours.
Now a robot is about to rob a mom somewhere of a decent job. Soon a kitchen robot will make another mom afraid of the kitchen since she will not spend any time there but the question is are robbers going to get their jobs taken by robots? Robot robbers fancy anyone? Or Rob-o-robot?
> Now a robot is about to rob a mom somewhere of a decent job. Soon a kitchen robot will make another mom afraid of the kitchen since she will not spend any time there but the question is are robbers going to get their jobs taken by robots? Robot robbers fancy anyone? Or Rob-o-robot?
F*cking Kek!
You guys and your collective aversions to laugh at the 'automate away every job' narrative is why people have to create throwaways to make that joke... its so sad.
I'm personally waiting for 'chef-bot' to do all my heavy lifting, tedious prep work and cleaning so I can just focus on the fun stuff in a kitchen. Hell, I'd probably have the motivation to work in tech/startup in the mornings and kitchens in the evenings like I did in my 20s if that were the case. I say bring it on!
Edit: Haha, not even 25 seconds on the downvote... you guys are a riot.
I've tried, but it's not worth it. DIY is more difficult, you need more than one mirror, you have to clean all the hair, and it definitely takes more of your time. I have the blades but only use them for the beard.
If it's a #2 all over you'll have no problem finding the remaining patches with your hands. No mirrors needed, just feel your head. This is true for most guards about #4 and below. Above that and the length of the hairs are not different enough to feel the differences.
I used to cut my hair (and my friends') as an undergrad, so I picked up a clipper about 9mo ago and started doing mine again (and my son's, if he'll hold still...). It's fine, I rarely get it perfect on the first go, but I just tidy up the next day. The clipper cost less than a single trip to a barber...
You still need to make a clean line at the back and do around the ears. If you don't it looks really sloppy. Definitely something you can learn, but it's not as easy as just running the buzzer over your head.
If you want to get your moneys worth for a buzz at the barber ask them to fade or taper it.
Hey HN I'm the founder behind this. I'm a guy and I'm tired of:
* Waiting for a haircut when I book an appointment.
* The inconvenience of only having one barber that knows our style, especially when I'm traveling for work.
* The cost of a haircut, which can push beyond $50 here in the bay area.
So we're building a robot that comes in kiosk form and lives in airports, malls, and offices. You book an appointment, come in, get your cut, and go about your day; all without talking to anyone.
We're in open beta and charging $6 for neck fuzz cuts here in downtown Oakland. If you're interested, pop over an email (arithmetic@gmail.com).
I wonder how much a hair dresser in the bay area makes, and how far they have to travel from their tiny apartment to reach their work place, where $50 are charged for a haircut.
have you considered donating all your revenues to a foundation that teaches future unemployed hair dressers how to code? /s
If not what else do you do to be able to sleep at night?
I frequent one of those $50 places in SF and my most recent barber has driven in from Fresno and was crashing on a friend’s couch while he cut hair for the weekend.
Obviously there's a trade off between unemployed hair dressers and users, who save money.
In dollar terms, I don't think it's fair to assume harm to hairdressers is greater than benefit to users, which, I suspect, far outweighs cost to hairdressers.
Is this an "SF problem"? I live in the east bay (Union City) and a haircut costs $20 at local places and I never have to book an appointment, never have to wait, I just walk in and get it done right away and I walk out the door. I had no idea that SF haircuts costed $50 and required booking an appointment.
I live in Albuquerque, and this sort of thing varies greatly around here. There are certainly places that are $35-50 for a hair cut and require appointments, but there are also barber shops and chains where you can walk in and get a haircut right away for $10-15.
How long does your robot take to do the hair cut. I never wait more than 10 min for a haircut. Currently if you do the appt. online, you can go around that time and they will take you right away. Your concept is good but may be you need to pivot.
Great point rajeshshamara. Here's how we're defining the time involved in getting a haircut:
(1) Time spent making an appointment
(2) Time spent going to the barber
(3) Time spent waiting the while barber is finishing their existing client (which can equal zero, to your point, but is often not)
(4) Time spent getting haircut
(5) Time spent getting back to what you were doing
That can add up to an hour.
With our solution, we're hoping to cut (2) and (4) to zero by us putting these where you already are (work, airports, etc). Because robots are predictable, we think we can get (3) close to zero. (4) though slower than than an actual human now, will eventually get faster.
- I go to my barber and never wait if I have an appointment. That is the meaning of "appointment".
- Depends on your style. I go with #2 on the sides, leave 1-1.5 inch on the top, scissor cut. Anyone can do that haircut, and I frequently rotate barbers at the same shop I've been going to for 4 years, based on time slots.
- $50 is absurd for anything except a luxury/specialty haircut. I would never pay more than $20.
He says "waiting after scheduling an appointment", which to me seems to imply that the wait for scheduling the appointment is the part that takes time. E.g., your barber is booked up until a week from today, so you have to wait until the date of the closest appointment you managed to schedule comes up.
"all without talking to anyone"? Personally, I enjoy talking to my hair stylist while getting a cut. I've gone to the same stylist for years, so it wouldn't feel the same getting a cut by either a non-conversational machine or a stylist who doesn't know me as well.
Me too and so I bought some clippers for $50 to cut my own hair. Having been at it for a few years I can say it's worth the investment. It's simple to cut several styles of hair by yourself in the mirror. I often get compliments for how my hair is styled. I don't have any appointments and I spend less time in total on my hair.
If you do your own color, this is where the economy really becomes multiplicative because hair salons generally don't like spending hours processing people's hair since you are sitting in one of their chairs. Where multiple colors may run you $250-400 in a salon, you can DIY for $40 and it looks just as good (often better after you have experience).
The price is an overestimation. It assumes multiple semi-permanent colours, developer, bleach, gloves, and other stuff as it wears with use or gets lost.
Seconded. I've been cutting my own hair for like 4 years and at this point get _much_ better haircuts then I was getting at barbers. I started by watching some youtube videos but now just do it. It's really not that hard. I started not to save money but because $20 haircuts were really bad half the time or more it seemed.
Disclaimer: There were a few accidents early on that left me looking like a Marine boot-camp recruit for a few weeks. But over time I got it down.
This haircut robot is cool though. I'd certainly try it out at least once.
Same here. My final straws were 1) my regular local barbershop suddenly disappearing on me, while I was still holding a few of their discount haircut coupons I had stupidity to buy in advance (let this be a lesson to you folks), and 2) tried another shop and saw in horror how dirty their tools/accessories were.
So being a DYI guy, I watched a few YT videos, bought $20 electric clippers, made my share of beginner's mistakes, but now I really enjoy getting better at it and won't go back at any price.
Yes, the back of the head is the hardest part. When I don't ask for someone else's help, I try to choreograph the movement I saw in a video: put my other hand horizontally to limit the range and move the clipper in a precise fade-out manner, bottom-to-top. I like it short. Use 2 mirrors and don't hurry.
You can use a comb or a stencil to make a line and carefully follow it. If you have good dexterity and flexible mirrors, you can do it by eye. Or if you fade to 0 length you may not need to cut a sharp line depending on your style.
How would you cut the top part of your hair if you want to do a short back and sides? The back and sides seems fairly straight forward with clippers, but trimming the top to a length you like seems difficult.
I do it the same way I've observed barbers doing it when I got haircuts.
Grab a swath of hair between middle and index fingers, pull fingers up until desired length to cut off is sticking out, cut using fingers as a guide.
I have really fine hair though so slightly uneven or layered cuts look better and give my hair more body and it's actually better if it's not exactly perfect.
I'd recommend an alteration that that would serve a few benefits. You should have the person getting the haircut sit on something like a massage chair where they can put their face into that circular hole.
This would (a) keep their face in a designated predefined place and position and serve as a reference point for the haircut, (b) allow you to embed a sensor into the face rest so you know when they pick their face up and can pause the robot, and (c) you can provide a monitor to display shows they can watch during the haircut, or ads (not that I necessarily approve of this).
hanniabu, this is an excellent suggestion. We were thinking about a chin rest (like what you see at an optometrist) but we didn't like how constricting it would be. I do like the idea of a headrest embedded with some sensors, though.
I was too so now I do it myself. I use an electric cutter that vacuums the hair as I cut. It takes me 15 mins at most and I can do it as often as I need. Interesting idea but how useful is a robot for that?
I've had a similar idea for awhile, and since you seem to be actively working on it, let me share some of my thoughts:
If you had a very close camera that touched the head, you could map a person's head pore-by-pore. By looking at nearest neighbor surrounding pores, the camera should be able to determine exactly where it is on the person's skull. The cutting device should be a small vacuum attached to the camera that can suck up a few strands at a time and trim those precisely.
By combining the perfect pore mapping to the precise strand cutting, you could write an app to customize the exact haircut you wanted, and the cutter should be robust enough to handle it, even with unintentional movement.
EDIT>> A modification: the vacuum cutter can also serve as a strand-measuring device. So you could go to an actual hair cutting salon, get your hair cut perfectly, then visit the device, which will go over your pore-mapped head and measure all of the strands to remember your "perfect" haircut.
I'd go with a forehead rest and camera to register facial features position to control for head movement, and just use a vacuum tube/trimmer with some type of length sensor in order to sample length at every 2mm of the scalp, then recreate it at a later time.
this is literally the exact same idea I’ve had. except I was also considering some sort of static device that when touched would raise all your hair on edge rather than just a small surface area under the vacuum.
Hi ASalazarMX - no it couldn't. We have software constraints around speed and position. Additionally, there's hardware checks that shut down the arm if it moves too fast and/or encounters too much pressure.
Thanks for answering. For a moment I let my imagination run wild and pictured a spy hacking your barber to commit the perfect crime.
Edit: Since you mentioned it's an UR3, its payload is probably the same as the UR3e (3 Kg), so no neck breaking strength. Maybe strangulation if the user cooperates.
I thought this was going to be a Simone Giertz video.
I hope this takes off, I really don't like the ordeal of getting my hair cut, the ability to sit in a Haircut-o-matic and listen to a podcast or some music would be great.
I see your smile but I thought I'd answer anyways :)
A while. We've had folks ask about it and we're going to stay away from it for now for the obvious reasons. Close to 50% of all haircuts are clipper cuts so we think there's a large enough market there.
Personally I think this is a fantastic idea, I always have an issue with barbers getting wildly different hairstyles from the same specifications, a few inches off top with scissors, 3 buzz on the sides, you'd be surprised the variation that occurs from that simple specification.
Are you just using Jacobian transpose for force control on the neck? I ask because it seems a bit stiff, the red marks on the neck of the test subject suggested to me that maybe there's a lot of noise in your force sensing, or at least unmodeled behavior.
Due to the slow growth of test subject hair, have you found 6$ to be cheap enough to keep your test cycles short enough?
The kinematic configuration of the arm looks odd, did you pick this to maximize rank of the Jacobian or the manipulability matrix?
UR website[0] seems to suggest +- 10N (a kilo resting on your neck) with their stock implementation. I imagine you're going to want something better than that.
What Force/Torque sensor do you use? Some of them are temperature sensitive and require a good warm-up period before they can be used to achieve good performance.
Not OP but I've written custom force control code for a UR5e. There's a six axis force sensor on the end effector for the e model which has a pretty noisy raw output. After some filtering we were able to get a pretty sensitive controller. I didn't measure it, but far less than 10N.
Nnnnnnnnnope, not letting a robot anywhere near my head with sharp stuff.
Have you thought about how you will get people comfortable with this idea? Even with clippers, with a guard, you can still do some damage to someone's skin (and, you know, giving them a horrendous looking haircut). I'd imagine many people would be extremely wary of such a contraption.
>So we're building a robot that comes in kiosk form and lives in airports, malls, and offices. You book an appointment, come in, get your cut, and go about your day; all without talking to anyone.
How are you handling sanitation? Actually cleaning all the hair up? Water for easier cutting (dry hair, curly hair, etc changing the moisture levels can change the ease of cutting)? Washing hair that has product in it? Adding product? Upselling and making a good chunk of your profit by selling overpriced product?
What about the fact that this is all regulated at a state level in the United States and most (if not all) require a cosmetology license to cut hair with varying levels of education and hours required before.
What about other public health laws/requirements? Dropping a salon in a mall, in a contained area, is one thing but dropping a kiosk in the middle of an airport or mall is another.
What sort of system do you plan for when someone is unsatisfied with the outcome? How do you plan to handle "no I don't like that, can you change it a little"? What about the fact that human heads are not uniform or even symmetrical? What about natural parts?
How does the buyer communicate they want their sidebrowns at this level, their bangs at this level, keep/lose the widow's peak, etc?
What about people that don't want a bowl cut or a buzz cut?
What about someone that has lice? Open wounds? Isn't remotely clean? Will it confuse excessively dry skin with lice and refuse service?
What happens when a pair of clippers snag on someone's hair, do they just sit there waiting for a passerby to cut their hair so they can be freed? Do they wait for mall security to tell them it's time to leave because the mall is closing? Do they have to wait for the kiosk babysitter to come back from their smoke break?
What if there is a power outage? Mechanical failure? Does the person leave with only a percentage of their hair cut, is there a second system that can resume, is there a battery backup, will the components most prone to failure be able to be replaced in that session by the equipment to continue?
How do you clean the chair that gets sat in? The floor around it? Hair will fall, regardless of a vacuum.
How will you minimize noise? Filter the exhaust? How often will the filter(s) need serviced? What happens if there is a vacuum/suction failure and hair is being left behind?
How well will the system identify black hair on someone with dark skin? Blonde hair on someone with very light skin? Pink hair? Blue hair? Curly hair? What if someone is balding considerably, how will it identify where to cut/not to cut? What if someone has a beard, how will it know where to terminate? What if they have bushy eyebrows? Will it confuse a several hundred dollar wool/cashmere sweater with the person's hair? How will it handle hair that is longer than a few inches?
Despite all your good points, this is perfect for people like me who just buzz cut the same length every couple of months. No scissors or blades.
It looks terrifying if you think of it as a robot barber, but who knows? maybe robot buzz cutters could even standardize hair fashion because of their massive convenience.
Clippers are still sharp, can still cause razor burn-like damage, can still jam, can still benefit from some hair being wet etc. I've worn a #1 or #2 all over for half my life now and have had incompetent stylists give me severe razor burn-like irritation, pull at my hair with clippers that weren't well maintained, be quite aggressive with the pressure over my scalp, regularly miss strands here and there that I then find days later in the mirror and have to trim with scissors, etc.
You can also put a guard on clippers and get varying lengths of hair remaining due to the angle, then of course lining up sideburns/removing sideburns/squaring the back/leaving the back natural/cutting my widow's peak down to the skin without asking me (which many people want) etc.
That's actually probably far more realistic as a viable product although it would still require a human for trimming the nails, pushing the cuticles back etc but would allow for much finer detail to be done.
I imagine sensors would be able to identify the nail much better too (both optically and via a physical sensor).
- Some small 'receptacle' that you place the finger it, it applies a very modest amount of pressure to hold the digit still.
- Optically scan the still digit to identify the nail
- Some sort of stylus type device domes down and quickly probes the perimeter to create a second data point of where cuticle and skin are
- Nail is then painted with the color selected and any pattern option selected
- A small air hose near the application head/compartment is removing the fumes from the immediate area
- Paint is cured via UV quickly
- Any additional features such as stones are then placed
You could do each digit individually or do all of the fingers of one hand at once, then the thumb, then the other hand. It would be quicker, capable of much finer detail, etc. You'd be able to have someone hammering out manicures/cutting and then send people over to a row of machines to pick exactly what they want from a screen or instantly load their preferred setting from previous visits. Someone could even design what they want in an app before hand, or purchase a special design from a community market place for a modest fee.
This works great in a mall or airport because you can have minimal staff doing the trim/cuticle push/roughing up which could be done in a minute or two and then you kick people over the machines for the nail decoration, have little applicators of polish remover available for any accidental skin painting, something like a cotton swab or little sponge that is pre-moistened.
That's printing, It mentions an ink cartridge in the Q&A, even with the UV curing I imagine it doesn't last very and is probably incredibly thin. The one customer image on there with examples... ooof they look like someone took model decals and put them on off-center and crooked too.
Someone could definitely improve on that considerably with a machine that actually paints the nails.
Not a regular commenter, but I had to reply. I think everyone here agrees this is just a prototype/early work. Why would you be so dismissive of a tool that someone is building from scratch? They are not claiming it is a finished product. Jesus, tone it down.
Sure we could argue semantics, but to me putting together off the shelf software and hardware isn't "building a robot", but maybe that the vernacular these days. None of that is from scratch.
It seems that its being billed as nearly ready to go.
> we're building a robot that comes in kiosk form and lives in airports, malls, and offices.
Just let my comment stand for the man-on-the-street view, ignorant of the technical specifics. No way am I letting a robot shave my head.
That is never gonna work. Seriously. Cutting hair is a highly manual job, requiring precision use of a number of different tools- some pretty dangerous- on an irregular, soft and constantly moving surface. Covered in, well, long, irregularly shaped hair. The idea of a hair cutting robot is fun, but it's decades or more ahead of what we can do.
It seems a lot easier than driving a car, and your description of the task sounds like surgical robots, which are a thing already, with superhuman capabilities.
I don't think it is easier than driving a car- somehow it feels even harder. Driving is a very well defined task: you are sitting in a precise position from which you get a well defined and purely visual input, and based on that you operate on three or four analog commands- maybe 3 degrees of freedom in all? And while the visual environment can be complex, there are situations- such as driving on a highway- in which the environment has already been reduced to a schematic version of itself: a wide, mostly straight road, with lanes and sides marked, and all other objects on it conveniently vehicle-shaped.
Cutting hair is none of this: your position constantly changes, and the stuff you're operating on is irregularly shaped and constantly moves and tilts and turns. You need to manipulate small tools relying on a mix of visual, touch and force feedback, and you need to interact with hair, which is probably difficult to model.
I don't know much of surgical robots, but I assume they're either executing pre-planned operations with a single tool on a completely still subject and/ or they're being controlled by a human surgeon.
I'm sure I've read in the past about robotic surgery allowing compensation for a patient that is definitely not completely still, whereas traditional methods might, say, require stopping the heart. Are they still "controlled" by a human? Maybe, but there are different levels of control.
Exactly, it's an early stage proof-of-concept prototype (TRL 3, if you prefer that scale). While I have my reservations about how difficult it will be to actually get this into something you can safely and reliably use on a consumer without lawsuits (that's a long road), it makes no sense to judge the idea solely based on an early bench prototype.
They're just proving out the idea - it makes perfect sense to buy/rent/borrow a COTS robot arm and use commodity hardware (iPhone X 3D scanner) to demonstrate that there's potential and that the software can be made to work. What follows are progressively higher and higher fidelity prototypes to eventually converge on a marketable solution (maybe with a custom mechanical solution rather than a generic 6DOF manipulator - several iterations are required for sure).
Hardware is a long road, something like this takes years. They are doing exactly the right thing by producing a basic demo - it doesn't have to be pretty, it just has to show that the idea has the potential to work. After this they can go and try to raise some money for the next step.
I think there is real under-appreciation by a lot of software engineers on HN regarding how much hardware development actually costs in dollars and time terms. The robot arm in the video costs north of $20k. The prototype phases between here and a consumer product will probably consume tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in materials and likely a few million in labour. It's not at all like firing up a pretty-looking SaaS MVP with a few months of labour and some negligible AWS costs, and I think the HN crowd often forgets that.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] threadI always wanted to setup super cheap kiosk-based hair cutting (I was going to call it RyanHair), but I basically felt the clippers were going to be stolen all the time.
I remember when I played football in middle school, we had a maximum hair length of 2 inches (and couldn't touch your ear or shirt collar), so we pretty much all just got 0/2 fades or buzz cuts every month from one of the teammates mom for $5.
Wasn't a bad business. She made $150-200 in a single day in a couple of hours.
F*cking Kek!
You guys and your collective aversions to laugh at the 'automate away every job' narrative is why people have to create throwaways to make that joke... its so sad.
I'm personally waiting for 'chef-bot' to do all my heavy lifting, tedious prep work and cleaning so I can just focus on the fun stuff in a kitchen. Hell, I'd probably have the motivation to work in tech/startup in the mornings and kitchens in the evenings like I did in my 20s if that were the case. I say bring it on!
Edit: Haha, not even 25 seconds on the downvote... you guys are a riot.
If you want to get your moneys worth for a buzz at the barber ask them to fade or taper it.
* Waiting for a haircut when I book an appointment.
* The inconvenience of only having one barber that knows our style, especially when I'm traveling for work.
* The cost of a haircut, which can push beyond $50 here in the bay area.
So we're building a robot that comes in kiosk form and lives in airports, malls, and offices. You book an appointment, come in, get your cut, and go about your day; all without talking to anyone.
We're in open beta and charging $6 for neck fuzz cuts here in downtown Oakland. If you're interested, pop over an email (arithmetic@gmail.com).
Interesting project. Good luck with it.
have you considered donating all your revenues to a foundation that teaches future unemployed hair dressers how to code? /s
If not what else do you do to be able to sleep at night?
In dollar terms, I don't think it's fair to assume harm to hairdressers is greater than benefit to users, which, I suspect, far outweighs cost to hairdressers.
Until the first one glitches and maims a person.
(1) Time spent making an appointment
(2) Time spent going to the barber
(3) Time spent waiting the while barber is finishing their existing client (which can equal zero, to your point, but is often not)
(4) Time spent getting haircut
(5) Time spent getting back to what you were doing
That can add up to an hour.
With our solution, we're hoping to cut (2) and (4) to zero by us putting these where you already are (work, airports, etc). Because robots are predictable, we think we can get (3) close to zero. (4) though slower than than an actual human now, will eventually get faster.
- Depends on your style. I go with #2 on the sides, leave 1-1.5 inch on the top, scissor cut. Anyone can do that haircut, and I frequently rotate barbers at the same shop I've been going to for 4 years, based on time slots.
- $50 is absurd for anything except a luxury/specialty haircut. I would never pay more than $20.
https://tenor.com/view/seinfeld-reservation-rent-car-gif-126...
"You see guys bringing in a picture of Brad Pitt, like dude I can't make you look like that"
Made me pretty mad honestly.
He says "waiting after scheduling an appointment", which to me seems to imply that the wait for scheduling the appointment is the part that takes time. E.g., your barber is booked up until a week from today, so you have to wait until the date of the closest appointment you managed to schedule comes up.
When I used to go to a barber in NYC, it was $50 + tip for a cut and shave, which I feel was a better deal than the supercuts haircut I get now.
When I go home they’re still charging $18
Women's cuts, though... this may be the first time I would apply the word "disruptive" when this allows their prices to get on par with men's cuts.
Probably not the point, but there's generally no wait, little small-talk, and he'll clean up loose hairs with an industrial vacuum
If you do your own color, this is where the economy really becomes multiplicative because hair salons generally don't like spending hours processing people's hair since you are sitting in one of their chairs. Where multiple colors may run you $250-400 in a salon, you can DIY for $40 and it looks just as good (often better after you have experience).
Disclaimer: There were a few accidents early on that left me looking like a Marine boot-camp recruit for a few weeks. But over time I got it down.
This haircut robot is cool though. I'd certainly try it out at least once.
So being a DYI guy, I watched a few YT videos, bought $20 electric clippers, made my share of beginner's mistakes, but now I really enjoy getting better at it and won't go back at any price.
Grab a swath of hair between middle and index fingers, pull fingers up until desired length to cut off is sticking out, cut using fingers as a guide.
I have really fine hair though so slightly uneven or layered cuts look better and give my hair more body and it's actually better if it's not exactly perfect.
This would (a) keep their face in a designated predefined place and position and serve as a reference point for the haircut, (b) allow you to embed a sensor into the face rest so you know when they pick their face up and can pause the robot, and (c) you can provide a monitor to display shows they can watch during the haircut, or ads (not that I necessarily approve of this).
If you had a very close camera that touched the head, you could map a person's head pore-by-pore. By looking at nearest neighbor surrounding pores, the camera should be able to determine exactly where it is on the person's skull. The cutting device should be a small vacuum attached to the camera that can suck up a few strands at a time and trim those precisely.
By combining the perfect pore mapping to the precise strand cutting, you could write an app to customize the exact haircut you wanted, and the cutter should be robust enough to handle it, even with unintentional movement.
EDIT>> A modification: the vacuum cutter can also serve as a strand-measuring device. So you could go to an actual hair cutting salon, get your hair cut perfectly, then visit the device, which will go over your pore-mapped head and measure all of the strands to remember your "perfect" haircut.
Like Gerty in the movie Moon [1]? The problem is that it only works for straight hairs.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84Ewj-BOBuc
Edit: Since you mentioned it's an UR3, its payload is probably the same as the UR3e (3 Kg), so no neck breaking strength. Maybe strangulation if the user cooperates.
Clearly another untapped business opportunity.
https://youtu.be/yQSh1MWIdVU?t=223
I hope this takes off, I really don't like the ordeal of getting my hair cut, the ability to sit in a Haircut-o-matic and listen to a podcast or some music would be great.
A while. We've had folks ask about it and we're going to stay away from it for now for the obvious reasons. Close to 50% of all haircuts are clipper cuts so we think there's a large enough market there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnLEG3kWSko
Impressive chops, I must say, but the DOD will want to hire you sooner than Uber for Barbers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XrfriIKjbs
And full morning routine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0S3Jf-NxdI
Are you just using Jacobian transpose for force control on the neck? I ask because it seems a bit stiff, the red marks on the neck of the test subject suggested to me that maybe there's a lot of noise in your force sensing, or at least unmodeled behavior.
Due to the slow growth of test subject hair, have you found 6$ to be cheap enough to keep your test cycles short enough?
The kinematic configuration of the arm looks odd, did you pick this to maximize rank of the Jacobian or the manipulability matrix?
We're using the stock force control software and plan to tweak it soon. I couldn't tell you how it works under the hood.
We use mannequin to test and then, other body parts [0]. Long term, we want to invest in a better testing harness. Open to ideas on how to do that.
[0] - https://twitter.com/manishsinhaha/status/1202078849619513345
What Force/Torque sensor do you use? Some of them are temperature sensitive and require a good warm-up period before they can be used to achieve good performance.
[0]https://www.universal-robots.com/how-tos-and-faqs/how-to/ur-...
Have you thought about how you will get people comfortable with this idea? Even with clippers, with a guard, you can still do some damage to someone's skin (and, you know, giving them a horrendous looking haircut). I'd imagine many people would be extremely wary of such a contraption.
>So we're building a robot that comes in kiosk form and lives in airports, malls, and offices. You book an appointment, come in, get your cut, and go about your day; all without talking to anyone.
How are you handling sanitation? Actually cleaning all the hair up? Water for easier cutting (dry hair, curly hair, etc changing the moisture levels can change the ease of cutting)? Washing hair that has product in it? Adding product? Upselling and making a good chunk of your profit by selling overpriced product?
What about the fact that this is all regulated at a state level in the United States and most (if not all) require a cosmetology license to cut hair with varying levels of education and hours required before.
What about other public health laws/requirements? Dropping a salon in a mall, in a contained area, is one thing but dropping a kiosk in the middle of an airport or mall is another.
What sort of system do you plan for when someone is unsatisfied with the outcome? How do you plan to handle "no I don't like that, can you change it a little"? What about the fact that human heads are not uniform or even symmetrical? What about natural parts?
How does the buyer communicate they want their sidebrowns at this level, their bangs at this level, keep/lose the widow's peak, etc?
What about people that don't want a bowl cut or a buzz cut?
What about someone that has lice? Open wounds? Isn't remotely clean? Will it confuse excessively dry skin with lice and refuse service?
What happens when a pair of clippers snag on someone's hair, do they just sit there waiting for a passerby to cut their hair so they can be freed? Do they wait for mall security to tell them it's time to leave because the mall is closing? Do they have to wait for the kiosk babysitter to come back from their smoke break?
What if there is a power outage? Mechanical failure? Does the person leave with only a percentage of their hair cut, is there a second system that can resume, is there a battery backup, will the components most prone to failure be able to be replaced in that session by the equipment to continue?
How do you clean the chair that gets sat in? The floor around it? Hair will fall, regardless of a vacuum.
How will you minimize noise? Filter the exhaust? How often will the filter(s) need serviced? What happens if there is a vacuum/suction failure and hair is being left behind?
How well will the system identify black hair on someone with dark skin? Blonde hair on someone with very light skin? Pink hair? Blue hair? Curly hair? What if someone is balding considerably, how will it identify where to cut/not to cut? What if someone has a beard, how will it know where to terminate? What if they have bushy eyebrows? Will it confuse a several hundred dollar wool/cashmere sweater with the person's hair? How will it handle hair that is longer than a few inches?
It looks terrifying if you think of it as a robot barber, but who knows? maybe robot buzz cutters could even standardize hair fashion because of their massive convenience.
You can also put a guard on clippers and get varying lengths of hair remaining due to the angle, then of course lining up sideburns/removing sideburns/squaring the back/leaving the back natural/cutting my widow's peak down to the skin without asking me (which many people want) etc.
That's actually probably far more realistic as a viable product although it would still require a human for trimming the nails, pushing the cuticles back etc but would allow for much finer detail to be done.
I imagine sensors would be able to identify the nail much better too (both optically and via a physical sensor).
- Some small 'receptacle' that you place the finger it, it applies a very modest amount of pressure to hold the digit still.
- Optically scan the still digit to identify the nail
- Some sort of stylus type device domes down and quickly probes the perimeter to create a second data point of where cuticle and skin are
- Nail is then painted with the color selected and any pattern option selected
- A small air hose near the application head/compartment is removing the fumes from the immediate area
- Paint is cured via UV quickly
- Any additional features such as stones are then placed
You could do each digit individually or do all of the fingers of one hand at once, then the thumb, then the other hand. It would be quicker, capable of much finer detail, etc. You'd be able to have someone hammering out manicures/cutting and then send people over to a row of machines to pick exactly what they want from a screen or instantly load their preferred setting from previous visits. Someone could even design what they want in an app before hand, or purchase a special design from a community market place for a modest fee.
This works great in a mall or airport because you can have minimal staff doing the trim/cuticle push/roughing up which could be done in a minute or two and then you kick people over the machines for the nail decoration, have little applicators of polish remover available for any accidental skin painting, something like a cotton swab or little sponge that is pre-moistened.
Someone could definitely improve on that considerably with a machine that actually paints the nails.
I'm probably not alone in being wary of this idea because of the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
This is too slow and too rigid. Scanning won't work in the real world. There's no immediate feedback from the surface.
You'll want something with whiskers and you'll want something on a semi-flexible armature. That industrial arm is terrifying.
Test it on a wriggling child.
Sure we could argue semantics, but to me putting together off the shelf software and hardware isn't "building a robot", but maybe that the vernacular these days. None of that is from scratch.
It seems that its being billed as nearly ready to go. > we're building a robot that comes in kiosk form and lives in airports, malls, and offices.
Just let my comment stand for the man-on-the-street view, ignorant of the technical specifics. No way am I letting a robot shave my head.
Cutting hair is none of this: your position constantly changes, and the stuff you're operating on is irregularly shaped and constantly moves and tilts and turns. You need to manipulate small tools relying on a mix of visual, touch and force feedback, and you need to interact with hair, which is probably difficult to model.
I don't know much of surgical robots, but I assume they're either executing pre-planned operations with a single tool on a completely still subject and/ or they're being controlled by a human surgeon.
They're just proving out the idea - it makes perfect sense to buy/rent/borrow a COTS robot arm and use commodity hardware (iPhone X 3D scanner) to demonstrate that there's potential and that the software can be made to work. What follows are progressively higher and higher fidelity prototypes to eventually converge on a marketable solution (maybe with a custom mechanical solution rather than a generic 6DOF manipulator - several iterations are required for sure).
Hardware is a long road, something like this takes years. They are doing exactly the right thing by producing a basic demo - it doesn't have to be pretty, it just has to show that the idea has the potential to work. After this they can go and try to raise some money for the next step.
I think there is real under-appreciation by a lot of software engineers on HN regarding how much hardware development actually costs in dollars and time terms. The robot arm in the video costs north of $20k. The prototype phases between here and a consumer product will probably consume tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in materials and likely a few million in labour. It's not at all like firing up a pretty-looking SaaS MVP with a few months of labour and some negligible AWS costs, and I think the HN crowd often forgets that.
Just saying