Given the risk of infection by COVID-19, some of us have chosen not to visit barbershops and hair salons. In this context, some are getting a haircut at home, while many people around the world are still sporting shaggy quarantine cuts.
Would you dare to cut your hair with a robot at home? During the quarantine, YouTuber and inventor Shane Wighton, from the “Stuff Made Here” channel, was so fed up with his shaggy head that he decided to build the ultimate hairstylist: a robotic barber to give it a new look.
The quarantine haircut robot uses only scissors – no trimmers – and a computer program that offers different haircut styles. The mechanism is attached to an adjustable lever, with an articulated arm that rotates around the customer’s head to cut hairs at different angles.
In the video, Shane Wighton explains how he trained the barber robot. His first idea was to use combs to lift locks like a human hairdresser, but face with the complexity of the task, he opted for a suction system. The vacuum inside the robot sucks the hair to pull it tight. The robot uses two fingers to separate the sections of hair, precisely determine the position of the head in order to cut the right length, and then the scissors do their job.
As a safety measure, the quarantine haircut robot measures the distance between the hair it wants to cut from the scalp. Because of this, it was unable to cut hairs around the ears and neck. The rest of the hair is cut to the programmed length, without exposing the Wighton to even a small scissor accident.
The end result is quite interesting. Wighton’s haircut was not worthy of a professional hairdresser’s job, but due to the current circumstances, it broke a branch, didn’t it?
