This robot will give you a new haircut… if you dare
"My hair is getting too long so I decided to build a robot to cut it for me." Watch a robot barber with scissors give a YouTuber a quarantine haircut.
Watch this brave inventor get his hair cut by a scissors-wielding robot.
With COVID-19 preventing many of us from visiting our favorite salons and barbershops, some of us must attempt to cut our own hair -- with varied results. One talented inventor was so fed up with his shaggy head that he decided to build a robot.
"My hair is getting too long so I decided to build a robot to cut it for me," Shane Wighton of the YouTube channel Stuff Made Here wrote in the description of his video that posted last week and has already been viewed over 1.7 million times.
The robot uses a computer program that gives a person options of haircut styles. The robot's scissors are attached to an adjustable lever that rotates around the head.
As a safety precaution, the robot measures the distance between the hair it wants to cut and the scalp. Because of this, the robot wasn't able to cut near Wighton's ears. Better safe than -- sorry, Vincent Von Gogh.
Then a bit like the famous Flowbee haircutting machine from the '80s, a vacuum inside the robot sucks the hair to pull it tight. The robot selects the hair to be cut, and then the attached scissors on the robot go to work.
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 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 built an even scarier drone barber, which was basically just a flying drone toting an electric razor. Yikes!
