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Re:Show HN: I'm building a robot that cuts hair, starting wi... by joe_the_user on Friday August 09, 2019 @03:46PM (#20657681)
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).

Re:Show HN: I'm building a robot that cuts hair, starting wi... by dopeboy on Friday August 09, 2019 @03:59PM (#20657777)
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).

Re:Show HN: I'm building a robot that cuts hair, starting wi... by GordonS on Friday August 09, 2019 @06:11PM (#20658613)
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?