Show HN: I'm building a robot that cuts hair, starting with beard trims [video]
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A sales representative is advertising his company's invention, a shaving machine. "You put your head in a box", he says, "and two razor sharp knives swoosh down and cut your beard."
"Don't people have different head shapes?", an audience member interjects.
"Only for the first time."
What arm are you using? Also what depth sensor?
A few suggestions:
It would appear that you're taking a pretty common approach to robot manipulation, sense, plan, "close your eyes" and then act. This works for stationary objects when you have high accuracy control and high accuracy sensing. Unless you're envisioning strapping people's heads down, your target is going to move. This will necessitate a closed-loop approach.
A closed-loop approach here would benefit from force control at the end effector. ATI[1] is a good source for 6-axis load cells and they've recently come out with smaller form factor load cells.
A second useful sensor would be a Time-of-Flight depth sensor. The old PMD Camboard Nano used to get up to 90 FPS and a close effective range (if I recall correctly ~3-4"). The time of flight sensors can be a bit noisy, but I've written up some of the smoothing approaches I've taken [2].
Good luck!
Deeply appreciative of your feedback. Long term, we want to install a force control sensor. The arm actually has a mode that detects negative torque so we may tap into that.
Might reach out to you separately for some follow ups - thanks again for the guidance here.
However, I suspect you're near the arm's payload limit with the clipper setup. Feel free to reach out. I get to the Bay Area every semester or so.
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.
- $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.
But I guess if you actually care about how your hair looks, it could cost more. :)
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..
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 :)
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...
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).
* 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).
> we may even go easier and start with neck fuzz
Surely nobody is going to pay just to get neck fuzz alone shaved off?
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.
- 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
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.
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.)
This is essentially an unsupervised internet accessible surgical robot.
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).
TBH that just seems like a ripoff.
Now a haircut costs $165 and it's an automatic subscription. Colombian barber still gets $3 though.
This is helping!
This way they could make the haircut free by having the bot slip product endorsements into the conversation.
barber shops are pretty unique places in that people are really chatty, and it doesn't really matter if you're e.g. a banker or fast food worker, you're still a part of the little community. it's cool to connect with people from all statuses and people tend to be really open, loose, good energy, plus you see the same characters all the time, so it's a mini community.
yeah, it's pretty expensive but i personally enjoy that routine/non automated part of my life.
Just ask, "Do you mind if I just chill here with my eyes closed while you cut?" If they get offended, find another barber.
I pop into a supercuts and I'm out in less than 15 minutes. Minimal chatting.
Not like supercuts, Floyd's, etc. Those aren't actual barbers - they are cosmetologists [1].
More info on the barbershop experience / history here: https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/rediscovering-the-ba...
Amazing service, always friendly fast cuts/shaves. Another nice aspect is you could be sitting in there with a lawyer, police officer, doctor, custodian and no one cares about your job/social status. The guys just wanna unwind after a long day of work, drink a few beers and talk about the latest in hunting/fishing/camping.
The same will become true of human barbers in a world where home robots provide perfect haircuts for the cost of energy and upkeep: those with disposable income seeking a personalized, artisanal, handcrafted experience will frequent a barbershop while most of the hoi polloi will take advantage of the robots.
Our prime demographic are working professional men who care about convenience, speed, and cost. Think standard management consultant who's pressed for time, needs to look good for client meetings, and would pay for a quick touch up.
I have often given myself a quick touch up before a presentation, business trip, or important meeting, so that part is a genuine value prop, but this solution seems a bit like building a robotic sledgehammer in order to swat flies.
That said, if you have Caucasian hair and just want to do an acceptable trim-up on your top-of-head haircut, the $20 kit will last years and do just fine. You'll feel the difference if shaving anything else though.. even with easy to cut hair, the immense power and smoothness of a true professional clipper is amazing.
I have to agree that the Wahl's kit you're talking about (Amazon ASIN B000JNQSIQ) looks like an excellent deal.
Personally, I cut my own hair, and would welcome a robot that can do it cheaply and more consistently than I can myself, and wouldn't require me to waste time going to a shop and then dealing with the human part that I really don't care for.
Its $33 for that with a solid beard trim; mine is at 3-4" and he keeps it looking nice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQSh1MWIdVU
OP's pitch is also on the youtube channel:
There’s likely a sizable population that cares more about convenience, cost, and predictability of outcome.
Premium barbershops currently compete on experiences vs outcomes: giving you a glass of whiskey, providing great ambiance, etc. If robots become the default for basic haircuts it will make premium barbershops seems all the more luxurious because you have an actual person (an artist!) cutting your hair. Perhaps they'll be able to raise their prices even more.
1st Disclosure: I'm one of the co-founders of On Deck and the OP is in the On Deck Fellowship.
2nd Disclosure: I thought this idea was completely crazy when Manish first brought in that absurd mannequin with the replaceable beards. Now, the more I think about what he's building and the opportunity space the more I love it.
That being said, when the first thing in the video was the robot jamming the clippers hard into the mannequin's jaw, I realized that while the idea is interesting, it not is not quite ready for prime time.
I suspect that styles shift subtly over time and a person's stylist give advice about what might look best on a person. And you might even want to seen by or see other customers of given a stylist.
Which is to say, I'd say absolutely, relationship with stylist matters but that relationship isn't just an irrational attachment to chatting with the person - it can extend to the finished product, how one winds-up looking.
One concern I have is, that razor really seems to push that dummy's head back quite a bit, and I'd imagine it'd be rather uncomfortable to have that wacking you. Is there any way to avoid that? Is it maybe not as painful as it looks?
Sounds like a good reason not to have a tattoo... among many other reasons. Are you trying to look like a criminal?
Besides, from the description it sounds like it has a standard hair clipper on it. Those don't have exposed blades, so it should be pretty safe.
The video is only a minute long, worth watching for the yucks.
It's cringe-worthy the way the the razor whacks into the dummy's head. The concern is brushed off with "the force sensing isn't there yet". Yeah, just a small matter of hardware and programming. And, as someone else pointed out, there's the small matter of the hand around the dummy's neck.
Comedy gold.
Fortunately, getting a haircut is not so expensive everywhere. To be honest with you what you try to accomplish is a repeated topic of discussion in my barber shop and for the moment they seem happy not to see this kind of tech working.
Where I live people go the barber shop to feel somebody is taking care of them and have a nice chat in addition to having a nice haircut.
I think it's a business that tries to overcome the loneliness but I think you can compete with this if Buzz Robotics brings a kind of human touch, maybe you could make people appreciate robots after all.
Of course, just like truck drivers don't want to see self-driving trucks. That doesn't mean it's a bad idea at all, just that people don't want their job automated away. As someone who hates barbershops, I'll take a robotic barber any day.
>Where I live people go the barber shop to feel somebody is taking care of them and have a nice chat in addition to having a nice haircut.
If that's what they want, then they can keep going to the barbershop for that experience, and keep it in business. No one's going to force them to use the robot.
>but I think you can compete with this if Buzz Robotics brings a kind of human touch
The whole point of something like this is to eliminate the human touch! It's to make getting a haircut a quick, inexpensive, and automated experience, just like buying a drink from a vending machine instead of going to a shop and having it hand-made for you while you sit and chat with someone. It's entirely possible to make coffee with an automatic machine, but Starbucks doesn't seem to be hurting.