Guy Builds Haircut Robot for Use During Quarantine

Getting a haircut before the coronavirus pandemic hit wasn’t a big deal, but now, many states have yet to reopen their barber shops and hair salons. So, your options are either a self-cut, or in the case of engineer Shane Wighton, better known on Youtube as Stuff Made Here, built a haircut robot. This isn’t a simple robotic arm that simply buzzes your hair, but rather one equipped with scissors, sensors, probes, and lots more high-tech gadgetry.

Wighton actually had to train the robot on how to use two combs to separate the sections of hair, and went as far as building a special mechanism just for that task. Unfortunately, robots do not use the same logic as humans, so for the former to see individual hairs and separate them w0uod require overhead cameras and advanced object detection algorithms. Rather than go the complex route, he just equipped it with a comb device and vacuum tube that sucks up the hair, enabling it to cut with the scissors.

I would rather not have someone cut my hair who’s also touching 100 other people’s heads all day long, so I built this robot,” said Wighton.