- $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.