Video screenshot by Bonnie Burton/CNET
With COVID quarantine preventing us from seeing our favorite hairstylists and barbers, some of us have to attempt to cut our own hair with varied results. One talented inventor was so fed up with his shaggy hair that he decided to build a robot to cut his hair.
“My hair is getting too long so I decided to build a robot to cut it for me,” inventor Shane Wighton of the YouTube channel Stuff Made Here wrote in his video description.
The robot uses a computer program that gives a person different options of haircut styles. The robot’s scissors are attached to an adjustable lever that rotates around the human’s head.
As a safety precaution, the robot measures the distance between the hair it wants to cut from the scalp. Because of this, the robot wasn’t able to cut near Wighton’s ears. Better safe than becoming Vincent Von Gogh, I suppose.
Then a bit like the famous Flowbee haircutting machine from the ’80s, a vacuum inside the robot sucks up the hair, which is pulled tight, then the part of the hair to be cut is selected. Then the attached scissors on the robot cut the hair.
The end results are interesting. Wighton’s haircut isn’t great, but it’s not terrible either. The only other drawback of his robot is that it apparently takes a lot longer for it to cut hair than a human barber. But that isn’t stopping Wighton from building another robot barber to “explore some of the crazier haircut concepts.”
“The possibilities for this… machine are endless with the most interesting things being haircuts that are too hard for human hair cutters to achieve,” Wighton wrote. “Imagine a mathematically perfect fade from one side of your head to another. Or imagine if I added a trimmer to this, and cutting a perfect lithophane pattern into your hair.”
If you want ideas for a more dangerous haircutting experience, check out this video from YouTuber and robot inventor Simone Giertz, who built a Hair-Cutting Drone.
YouTuber Roman Atwood also built an even scarier drone barber which was basically just a flying drone carrying an electric razor. Yikes!
