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).
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).
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
"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.
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 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.
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.
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.
What you are showing is not a haircut, the robot "shaves" the neck area - very slowly at that.
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.
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 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.
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 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?
The Flowbee seems like a natural pairing for this project. I've never used one, but it looks like it eliminates the finesse factor for getting all the hairs of a given length in a given stroke.
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.
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.
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.
Barber shops are traditionally, and presently, social gathering spots. Go to proper barber shops, not hair cutting chains, and you'll see people just sitting around hanging out talking.
>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.
>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
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?
There is a certain sort of personality that despises that sort of human contact. But I don't expect they're a large enough portion of the population to make such a robot commercially viable.
(Also that demographic is already served by hair-cutting vacuum cleaner gadgets.)
Usually I find barbers don’t even try talking to me because they tend to be older and their clients tend to be older so they don’t know what to say. And I look a lot younger than I am. Not that I want to talk to them anyway, due to awkwardness, but seeing all the other barbers talking to their clients and mine not even trying to talk to me somehow makes it even worse
My barber always leaves a TV running in the corner. If you're in a talkative mood he's more than happy to chat, but if you're the quiet sort he's content to work quietly and listen to the TV instead. (I'm not a huge fan of TV, but it's prompted some interesting conversations about motor sports, of which he's a fan but which I know fairly little about.)
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.
Personally I’d love a (competent) hair cutting robot because I simply don’t have time. The only day of the week I can get my hair cut is Saturday; I meant to get it done last Saturday, ran out of time, now I’m going out of town next Saturday and I am stuck looking terrible for the rest of the year.
If there were a robot at the mall I could get it done at 9pm on a Tuesday or whenever I have a moment.
Don't get me wrong. I enjoy socializing more than anything in the world.
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.
> But your brain chemistry is evolved to seek it as a survival mechanism, is all I’m saying
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 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!
eplanit, right there with you. There's a couple variables ahead in our list (precision, speed, repeatability) but cleaning up the hair will eventually get added to that list. My hunch is we'll start exerting tighter control over the end effector (which is just a Wahl trimmer right now) as we mature.
There is no better way for a software engineer to learn about the perils of poor software and machine learning than to go under the knife (literally). Cambridge Analytica and the constant fearmongering about data collection ultimately has very few immediate and direct impacts. The designers of Canadian/French radiotherapy machines never had to dogfood their own product. This on the other hand, has a very quick and immediate feedback loop. If one were to graduate from building robots to building e.g. airliner control systems, a bit of skin off the tip of the ear or scalp would pay for itself several times over if you factor in the loss of an airliner.
I get your point, but in this case, that arm is operating on its own without complete control by the user (I assume). Its not the same as playing with something.
It can go very, very wrong if that arm has a bug and there's no force feedback based cutoff.
Modern day razors are very safe and the worst that could happen is a clipped ear or a scratched scalp. Messy yes but hardly deadly. Just remember to restrict the movement state space of the arm so it can never be in front you (don't want it near eyes).
* 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.
> we're trying to create the barbershop of the future
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.
This reminds me of the machine starred in the "Casper, the friendly ghost" movie i watched as a kid. I hope you run more QA though. Would love to see your 2nd Prototype. Keep up the good work!
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.
Doesn't look scarry in the video at all. Smooth and careful.
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.
Cool concept. Spouses are good temporary workaround until this becomes mainstream. They also have the benefit of being multifunctional which provides a good ROI ;)
What’s about using laser for cutting hairs ? Not everyone’s heads surface is even e.g. I have a type of pimple in my head . And to use blades is more risky. There are laser treatment for hair removal. I think same can be used for cutting the hairs with the help of few other tools. Also, it will be more accurate, quicker, easier and safe to map the length of hair and then cut it via using laser.
Sure, if you can put up with the terrible smell. And lasers strong enough to burn hairs being deployed by automated robots? The first stray laser (either direct or reflected) at someone's retina will shutdown this idea quick.
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.
You should get an emergency stop button, one of those yellow boxes with a red button. They are cheap and could prove useful in your case to prevent a bloody massacre.
It doesn't matter if you move after the scan, so long as the orientation of your head is the same, you're good. You do need to stay pretty still during the cut and we have the screen + camera up front to assist you with that.
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.
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.
* 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).