Comment by dopeboy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dopeboy | Hacker News Reader

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Hey everyone, founder of Buzz Robotics here.

I'm a guy and getting a haircut is a pain. It takes too much time (appointment + waiting time + sitting time). It involves traveling to the one barber that knows our style. And it is expensive (~$65, on average, in SF).

We envision a future where you sit down in a kiosk, swipe your card, and a robot performs a fast, clean, consistent, and most importantly, _SAFE_ haircut on you. All for half the usual cost. And your cut is saved in the cloud for use at any Buzz Robotics kiosk in the world.

For the engineers in the crowd, that's a 6 degree of freedom robotic arm with a Wahl trimmer fitted at the end. The arm is provided by Haddington Dynamics (http://hdrobotic.com/). SDK is plain old JavaScript. The point cloud is supplied by a Pico Flexx camera using their C++ SDK.

If the business case interests you, here's a pitch I gave at last week's OnDeck fellowship demo day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td7L3qREzqA&feature=youtu.be

Lastly, if this sounds interesting to you, reach out (arithmetic@gmail.com). Happy to grab coffee too if you're in the bay area.

Do haircuts really cost $65 in San Fransisco? That seems like a number somebody would make up to parody the high cost of living. ("$65 haircuts! $10 for a loaf of bread! $25 to see a movie!")

Shopping at the right places in Toronto and that's about right.

- $65 Haircut? Pretty easy, even for a simple men's cut. (I've paid as low as $8 with...varying results)

- $10 loaf of bread? Look no further than https://brodflour.com/#menu

- $25 Movie? $11-12 for a base ticket and easily $15 for a pop and popcorn. Add a beer to that? +$8 And that's taking it light while still buying your concessions there.

An adult ticket to see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood tonight at 9:30 at the AMC Metreon in SF costs $21.99 ($24.19 with fees)

And I thought our Cineplex chain was expensive. For That price in CAD you can see the IMAX version.

that is the imax price. I just went there two weeks ago.

No, I pay $12. The stylists don't speak a lot of English and they only do about five styles, but I happen to like one of the styles they do, so it's all good.

But I guess if you actually care about how your hair looks, it could cost more. :)

Re hair cuts: The range is from about $15 all the way to $125, depending on what you are getting done and where. Someone who runs their own small salon, and takes 45 minutes between shampooing, conditioning, talking to you about where to put texture in, and has expensive looking decor is going to cost a lot more than someone who rents a chair at a Great Cuts location.

I've routinely paid that in Los Angeles as well

In the UK I pay £5 for a scissor cut. Best barber I've ever been to, and he will chat but doesn't need to. It is not a fancy place, there are piles of vintage magazines, a daily local paper and the chair is well worn in (looks like he had two chairs in the past, I guess one broke because he just took it out and moved to the other one). I was recommended the place by a friend who took her kids there 25+ years ago. There is usually a queue on saturday mornings but I've never been there more than half an hour.

I'm not sure I would go to a robot arm.

I bet there are places in California that are similar. Who cuts the hair of the guys who clean the streets and empty the bins? I don't suppose they can afford $65 for a haircut..

Also from the UK. There is a huge difference in prices between a barber shop (generally for men and boys) and a salon (generally for women and girls).

There is also a huge difference in price expectations between men and women (IME, of course there are differences for any gender) - most men I know expect to pay £5-£15 for a haircut, whereas most women I know expect to pay between £30-75 for a haircut.

At a salon you can get a restyle, shampoo, blow dry and all that stuff, which obviously adds to the time and cost, but even for a very basic trim you're looking at at least twice the cost at a salon vs a barber.

Personally, I cut my own hair with a set of Wahl clippers I've had for something like 20 (!) years. This obviously means I'm restricted to a buzz cut, but I think it suits me and has doubtless saved me a lot of money over the years :)

> Who cuts the hair of the guys who clean the streets and empty the bins? I don't suppose they can afford $65 for a haircut..

With the California housing crisis, this is solved by the fact that those folks don't live in SF. Many of them commute over an hour each way for those jobs. It's sort of a problem for us...

Here in India, I have the option of going to a cheap barber who costs about $1.2 (yes), a slightly better place that costs about $3, and a top of the line place that costs $8.

I pay roughly that in upstate NY. Sure, you can pay $8 for a basic haircut at Supercuts that takes them five minutes to cut around the outline of your head. But for anything more advanced you're going to someone skilled and that costs money.

You can easily pay that. Or you could go to either Rick's or Dick's on Geary and pay $20. ($15 haircut + $5 tip)

Depends on where you go. In the Sunset neighborhood there are several spots that do $15 cuts.

In Dubai, you can get one for 5AED ($1)

We envision a future where you sit down in a kiosk, swipe your card, and a robot performs a fast, clean, consistent, and most importantly, _SAFE_ haircut on you.

How long are you expecting the research phase to take?

I mean, honestly, trying avoid either snark or boosterism, this seems like a challenge akin to getting to level 5 self-driving cars but with a payoff a good deal less. I am both honestly interested in efforts to do things like this but also very much in awe at the hurdles such problems present.

We don't have humanoid robots that easily occupy the same space with a human, in the fashion that humans interact with each other daily without one human swinging their elbow into the face of another. Solving that problem is a big deal (it holds back things like medical transport robots). Shaving a person seems a more intense version of this problem - the problem isn't the raw dexterity of the robot but it's ability adjust to and even anticipate a person's micro bodily adjustments (oh, also adjust to the unique physical properties of a given person hair, properties that can even by the part of the body - I have curly patches in places, etc).

Despite my general pessimism here, I'd be interested in what tool you imagine could get there.

Edit: And one could solve this problem also with something akin to auto-adjusting helmet, so you essentially extend the logic of the plastic guards that keep clippers a fixed distance from the head - the problem here is you'd wind-up building an extremely complex machine without much guarantee of giving a good haircut (the simple motions of a barber conceal an awareness of what their object is and it isn't hair all the same length - an average person use guarder clippers to get that and literally not pretty).

We're still figuring it out is the honest answer. Here are some learnings from this past year that address some of your points:

* Robotic arms are getting better. They're becoming easy to interface with (I programmed the arm in the video using JavaScript) and they're getting cheaper (the arm in the video is $5k kit, $10k assembled).

* CV technology has advanced significantly in the past couple years thanks to self-driving tech and facial recognition tech. These are advances that can be repurposed to this venture.

* It's going to be baby steps. We mentioned starting with beards but we may even go easier and start with neck fuzz. It's going to be an iterative process and there might be some constraints involved on the UX side until we get better (e.g. asking the user to keep their face within a certain boundary).

Do you have any concerns around safety? What kind of safeguards will you put in place? For example, you might ask the user to keep still, but what happens if they suddenly turn/move their head just as the clippers are going in? Personally, I'd be as still as a statue with robotic clippers coming towards my face, but I'm sure people would get used to it eventually and react to loud noises outside, their phone ringing etc.

> we may even go easier and start with neck fuzz

Surely nobody is going to pay just to get neck fuzz alone shaved off?

why not just buzz it yourself?

A good buzzer is like 35 bucks in a kit, and then you get hundreds of 'free' buzzes, literally anytime you want. Plus no fear of a robot slitting your throat.

- As an animal it feels good to have someone else groom you

- Actually getting the line perfect is not trivial, even if you're experienced

- This brings us one step closer to The Jetsons, and I'm in favor

This isn’t someone else grooming you!

Unclear - c.f. Monkey and terry cloth mother studies.

Do you confuse this robot with your mother?

hard to clean up. sometimes misses spots, etc. I try to buzz myself but it always doesn't look as good

I did this a few weeks ago. I just quit a long tobacco habit, so I might have been a bit impulsive. For the most part, it turned out fine. I needed a second person to help trim the back, though. If you like a clean neckline, that's hard to do yourself.

Anyway, I rather have a 1990's Flowbee (https://www.flowbee.com/) than a robot. I've played Fallout 3 and know what can happen.

I'm only half joking when I suggest you might consider re-shooting and/or re-editing the video to elide the human hand strangling (er, "steadying") the dummy. It doesn't elicit confidence or a positive connotation.

That aside, as an introvert, but even as a beardless one, I have nothing but admiration for such efforts to remove human interaction! (Still only half joking.)

On the other hand, if he’s recruiting, it might elicit “I can do that better!” from engineers!

or he could put the mannequin head over an actual human head.

I think you’re going to need to invest a great deal in cybersecurity.

This is essentially an unsupervised internet accessible surgical robot.

We totally agree, zepto. Though we're still perfecting the computer vision and path tracing pieces, that is squarely next on the agenda. We realize there's a lot of trust users are giving us and we intend to honor that.

This is a very cool project and a bad business idea. I cut my own hair with a Wahl trimmer. Have you gotten liability insurance quotes for this yet?

I am not trying to be a buzzkill but you are going to knick ears, pull out small chunks of hair, and other minor trauma on customers if you try this. You want to have that liability insured and if not you might put yourself in personal financial or legal jeopardy, regardless of legal waivers (IANAL).

Holy Molly! 65 bucks for a haircut? In Colombia they're around 3USD, and in Chile around 7USD.

TBH that just seems like a ripoff.

Higher cost of living, and until you figure out a way to cut my hair in the USA while you're in Colombia or Chile I will have to pay $20 a cut minimum, here in a low cost of living part of the USA.

A new use for those surgery robots that let surgeons work remotely.

Now a haircut costs $165 and it's an automatic subscription. Colombian barber still gets $3 though.

This is helping!

One pleasure of getting a haircut or beard trim is a good conversation. Maybe not for everyone but it would be missed with a robot.

Not if the robot has a conversational bot built in.

This way they could make the haircut free by having the bot slip product endorsements into the conversation.

Wow, in Brasil we pay roughly $6 in a haircut.

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