Show HN: I'm building a robot that performs haircuts [video]
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* 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.
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-...
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.
Frankly, the approach does not seem suited to cutting hair. People will move their heads even involuntarily. Plus there is a lot more finesse needed for cutting hair than shaving.
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 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.
If you want to get your moneys worth for a buzz at the barber ask them to fade or taper it.
And of course reduces itchy cleanup.
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.
(Also that demographic is already served by hair-cutting vacuum cleaner gadgets.)
Before I found my current barber, I used to go to a 'hair salon' sort of place that had very talkative hip young hairdressers. They were always friendly but I found them harder to relate to. It was also a lot more crowded which didn't help, and they always seemed a little disappointed when I asked for a regular haircut.
If there were a robot at the mall I could get it done at 9pm on a Tuesday or whenever I have a moment.
Trying to turn on my "fun conversationalist" module with a stranger I have very little in common with can certainly feel like a painful chore for me.
Put another way, I'd rather not have to perform.
Shush it with your insightful biochemistry-evolution talk, just nod in agreement to the proponents who would rather make everyone live in the same bleak, isolating life of meaningless distraction that they have.
They have all that sweet VC money and we're all here to sell our apps!
"I want a robot to cut my hair in 2 minutes because why would I want to have to talk to a human being"
Or one that really alarmed me was Rob Rhinehart's (Soylent) comments about groceries
https://www.businessinsider.com/soylent-ceo-rob-rhinehart-qu...
>I have not set foot in a grocery store in years. Nevermore will I bumble through endless confusing aisles like a pack-donkey searching for feed while the smell of rotting flesh fills my nostrils and fluorescent lights sear my eyeballs and sappy love songs torture my ears.
We're turning into a reclusive, anti-social, afraid of each other, society because those are the types that get funding.
Shakespeare was a fortune teller:
>And private in his chamber pens himself,
>Shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out,
>And makes himself an artificial night.
>Black and portentous must this humor prove
>Unless good counsel may the cause remove.
I don't want to spend all of my time alone, staring at one display or another, interacting with code or algorithm-selected content.
Thank you for being one of the sane ones that sees the absurdity of it!
Small talk with a complete stranger cutting my hair feels very awkward though. We're not friends, have nothing in common, and I typically have nothing to say to him. Which means it's a considerable and awkward effort to keep a conversation going.
A cashier who asks "Did you find everything alright" because she gets fired if she doesn't also feels like talking to a hostage. That's a different thing, but it is also often cited as "human contact" by people, and that is very alien to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barber
>Barbershops are also places of social interaction and public discourse. In some instances, barbershops are also public forums. They are the locations of open debates, voicing public concerns, and engaging citizens in discussions about contemporary issues.
https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog/community-roles-barber-shop-and-b...
>Since the turn of the 19th century, beauty salons and barber shops have served as special places among African Americans. They have been places not only to get hair care services but locations where black people could be vulnerable and talk about issues of importance in the community. There were spaces where customers played games such as chess, cards, and dominoes, while having conversations about local gossip, politics, and community affairs.
And this isn't just an African American thing, it's a white thing, it's a Hispanic thing, it's an everyone thing.
Here's an article about how governments and non-profits are using salons and the like to help educate people about things, like getting help for domestic violence
https://www.governing.com/topics/mgmt/gov-barbershops-hair-s...
Recently in the medical drama New Amsterdam one of the main characters tried to set up a clinic in a low-income neighborhood barber shop (and it was likely taken directly from this real news https://www.nbcnews.com/health/heart-health/cutting-hair-blo... ).
Why do you think there is a line of films called Barbershop?
Or that on shows and movies of yesteryear, like The Andy Griffith Show, barbershops were hubs of the community where the men went (and still do) go to socialize?
https://www.thefader.com/2017/10/23/black-barbershops-photo-...
https://www.wnyc.org/story/fear-black-barbershop/
https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/rediscovering-the-ba...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bisnow/2017/07/06/barbershops-a...
https://www.ogleschool.edu/blog/resurgence-of-the-great-amer...
https://business.mindbody.io/education/blog/barber-shops-tre...
https://nearsay.com/c/456502/306271/why-barbershops-have-see...
https://scandinaviantraveler.com/en/lifestyle/retro-barbersh...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XrfriIKjbs
And full morning routine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0S3Jf-NxdI
This arm should go nowhere near your head unless you're absolutely sure it has all the necessary safeguards tested to not cause significant harm.
Edit: Looks like your twitter has vids showing tests with a dummy. However, its still scary.
It can go very, very wrong if that arm has a bug and there's no force feedback based cutoff.
* What about non-human use cases, like shearing pets between seasons? If you can solve getting pets to stay still could be a possible initial use case. Seems easier to get traction!
* As pitched, this seems more like an add-on than standalone product. Where could this be an add-on? Airport bar? Airport massage parlor? You need people to get into the door, the haircut won't be it but it can be part of the experience!
* Would salons/barbers be interested in buying this device so that they can service more customers, i.e. increase customers/hour or a similar metric? Run some surveys/ask owners to find out!
* Youtube video for the next iteration of the product can be sharper ... see something like Paolo from Tokyo videos, etc. Editing matters. You want this idea to go viral!
1) Possibly. It's not something we've explored though I am told by many pet owners that getting them to stay still is a challenging task.
2) I might disagree with you there; we're trying to create the barbershop of the future. It will live in airports, malls, and offices.
3) Yes and we're starting those conversations.
4) I hear you. I personally care a lot about presentation and what you're seeing now is the floor of our capabilities. It will only get better as we grow.
I think you are wholly out of touch with barbershops in most of the country. They are social places. People go, sit for 15, 30, 60 minutes waiting for their haircut talking to each other. In the past several years a lot of them have gone back to the 'old timey' setup with the 'old timey' garb even. The barbers don't just run some clippers over your head as fast as they can, they take their time. Even if you want a #2 all over they're going to use scissors, clippers and a straight razor. They're going to use warm lather to create crisp, shaved, lines, they're going to talk to you, you're going to talk to them, you're going to talk to other people sitting around, you might play a game of chess or checkers with the person next to you while you wait.
Barber shops, for many decades, have been social hubs. Places for men to go for an hour or two and shoot the shinola. Have you actually visited non-chain barbershops? Have you talked to any barbers or stylists? People build relationships with their clients, barbers and stylists have social media presences even now where they show off their skills and highlight clients.
What you are trying to create is a way to save the military money when they process people at basic training, which will probably actually cost them time as a skilled barber can do a buzz cut comparable with what your machine will do in a fraction of the time.
Even chain establishments, like Sport clips, sell you an experience. Every employee is wearing referee garb, everything is sports themed, sports content are on the televisions, the stores are decorated like locker rooms, hot towel, neck massagers, scalp wash, beard/neck trimming, etc.
What you're trying to replace is people like you that don't seem to like interacting with human beings and want everything as efficient as possible and just want a buzz cut. Most people are not like this. You're going to have a very tiny customer base, if your product can even legally be used (this stuff is regulated on a state by state basis, requires licensing, requires certain health standards, requires a human and varying amounts of training, zoning comes into play for where you can set up shop etc).
I also offered you dozens of questions elsewhere in the thread, none of which you addressed. There are a LOT of hurdles here.
I think you are in desperate need of actually talking to stylists/barbers, visiting some barbershops and salons and doing some reading research.
https://www.thefader.com/2017/10/23/black-barbershops-photo-...
https://www.wnyc.org/story/fear-black-barbershop/
https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/rediscovering-the-ba...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bisnow/2017/07/06/barbershops-a...
https://www.ogleschool.edu/blog/resurgence-of-the-great-amer...
https://business.mindbody.io/education/blog/barber-shops-tre...
https://nearsay.com/c/456502/306271/why-barbershops-have-see...
https://scandinaviantraveler.com/en/lifestyle/retro-barbersh...
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.
Yet, since the time savings are part of the advertized convenience, I wonder if a robot would be able to trim/shave as fast as a human stylist. The usual neck fuzz job is 10 sec at most for even student barber.
Sure, you could save booking/wating time, but the actual service time may still be bottlenecked by safety and precision requirements. So subjectively this could feel as dreadful, unless you'd mix in some interaction to mask the time flow.
Good luck!
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.
Just saying
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
Impressive chops, I must say, but the DOD will want to hire you sooner than Uber for Barbers.