Haircut machine V2: future of haircutting?

i've never done a live stream before so when i was asked if i wanted to give a live robotic haircut at one of the biggest live stream events of the year i said how about instead of using the original robot we totally redesign it rewrite the software give it some new skills and attempt the first haircut ever on a famous youtube personality live i mean what could go wrong right this crazy contraption that i'm sitting in this is the new robot and redesigning it wasn't totally up to me the old robot had some concerns mostly related to the scissors [Music] another issue with the old robot is that it's now a pumpkin carver it's a long story i'm gonna just spoil it this is a stupid plan live streams are insanely risky we messed up a lot of perfectly good hair and i ended up having to experiment on myself oh my gosh but it's going to take a bit of work for you to truly understand the depths of the stupidity so let's start at the beginning i'm super excited by the chance to redesign this the last robot had a few problems the biggest one being that you got a mullet whether you wanted it or not it would also leave a ridiculous amount of hair around your ears this is a chance to fix those issues but while we're at it it's also a chance to take things to the next level it is a robot so how about cutting a pattern into the side of your hair that'd be pretty cool aside from that pat there's also me it's been what five months since i said a haircut we're definitely gonna put me in the robot and take care of this problem as well i'm also going to see if i can find anyone else's stick in the robot because the more the merrier right this is all that's left of the first robot and it was a pretty immature design when you take something immature and thrust it into limelight it's going to come with baggage and this robot was no exception it was a robotic arm that could move anywhere on your head by rotating around it moving up and down and then rotating in a bunch of different ways so that it could point towards your head on the end was a mechanism that could detect where the head is grab your hair and then cut it to whatever length you want if you do this on every point of your head theoretically you have the haircut that you want the new robot has totally different parts but it operates in a similar way to the old one it just does it better and fixes a lot of issues the old robot was fundamentally flawed it couldn't cut below a certain height and this resulted in an automatic mullet which is pretty awesome but it would be nice if it was optional and the fix for this is easy flip the robot upside down now you can reach as low as you want if you made the arm longer it could easily be a back hair cutting robot the old robot had these dangerous scissors the main risk was grabbing your ear and then giving it a little snip i didn't want to become holyfield at the hands of muhammad ali bot so i added extra space around my ears to keep the scissors away this leaves a ton of hair around your ears which knocks a bunch of points off your iq the scissors are also limited in how short they can cut and they're pretty slow we're gonna swap out the scissors for high powered trimmers these can cut right over the ears they can cut really short and they're fast trimmers also make it easier to do a tool change in this case a drop in a second trimmer that'll do the pattern cutting this robot has one other issue that you might not expect this tube is just the worst it caused so many problems it would kink it would stall the motors i actually wrote software to try to detect situations where the hose would get caught or get kinked which is horrible it's the last thing you'll be doing when you're cutting hair live i've been staring at this hose for so long and i cannot find a way to arrange it where it won't happen if the tube has a problem flexing just don't have the tube so if a thing is causing me a problem remove that thing and i won't have a problem yeah exactly don't you think i would have tried that all right the thing that was causing the problem has been removed and i think the hose issue is a thing of the past this is a special pivot that you can vacuum through putting this on all the joints means that there's no hose to kink problem solved this new robot is super cool but a new robot like this comes with serious risk of not working all the time and a live stream you get one chance if it breaks that's it i'll fail in front of like i don't know 10 or 15 million people and it's a lot harder than you might think to guarantee that something like this will work all the time almost every single part is essential that means if even a single wire breaks it won't be able to function properly you can think of it as if each part of the robot forms a link in a chain if one link goes the entire chain fails the more links there are in the chain the more opportunities there are for something to break and when you look at the mathematics of this chain you'll see that i'm even more screwed than you probably think imagine that each part of the robot has a 1 in 10 chance of failure whenever i do a haircut it's like rolling a 10-sided die and if i get a specific number like a 1 then that part fails the problem is the way that these probabilities combine remember if a single part fails the entire robot fails it's like rolling 50 dice and trying to not roll a 1. very hard to do in fact if i roll the dice 200 times i should only expect it to happen once even if the parts have a 1 in 1 000 chance of failure which would correspond to a die with 1 000 sides i should still expect troll failure 1 out of 20 times this cold hard statistical reality is the most likely thing to screw me over there's lots of parts that need to be really reliable this is made even worse by something else i'm gonna get screwed by infant mortality you might think if i make a thing the odds of it failing or something like this it's reliable when it's first made but as it starts to wear out the odds of it failing go up but in reality the odds of failure often look like this things tend to fail a lot early in life this is what's called infant mortality the things that get past this tend to have pretty good reliability until they get old and die peacefully in their sleep this curve is so common it has a name which is a bathtub curve for pretty obvious reasons you're probably wondering what the deal is and why this happens when you make something there are a lot of ways to do it wrong and when that happens the thing that you made either doesn't work at all or it fails really fast you can be sure i'm going to have plenty of assembly issues this means i need to do lots of extra testing to get through all the infant mortality issues if i don't i'm virtually guaranteed to fail all right i'm about to do tons of haircut robot testing meet me in the bathtub that actually might not be the smartest thing to tweet getting this done is really tight because i had two other videos that i was making but i left several days before i fly out to do all the rigorous testing all right i'm finally done with the lock picking video we're gonna publish it and see how it does out in the world by itself all right this is the best part after all that work finally get to watch it and see what people think tons of people want you to send it to the lock-picking lawyer i'm definitely going to send a lockpicking lawyer don't worry well there's no time for relaxing i gotta go test this robot you know where my mac is isn't that dead all the code to do a haircut is on the computer that i fried cutting pumpkins i actually have about 80 hours to fly out that's a long time that's like two full work weeks of work if anything this is for the best because the code i had before was pretty terrible and this is my chance to do it the right way so much for testing but i can't test anything without code so i really wasn't too bad it took me about 30 hours the general idea behind the software is very similar to the last haircutting robot so there's a 3d head that i paint the length of hair i'd like to cut on how long the hair is corresponds to how dark the color is there's a second 3d model of the head that i paint the angle i'd like the cut to be done at and then i take both those heads and compute the series of locations i should cut with this is very similar to the way that the previous robot worked if you want to understand better you can check out the other video there's a new piece of functionality which is the ability to take a logo and project it onto the head and then use that to compute a series of cuts to realize it i'll get into the details of how that works later when i'm a little bit less tired and i have a little bit more time remember all that stuff i was saying about getting past infant mortality it actually applies to code as well so when the code is new there's going to be a lot of bugs you have to work through them and test it before you get to the kind of reliable zone and i still haven't tested the hardware we got like 40 something hours until i fly out it is crunch time oh hey are you tired well it's time for everyone's favorite thing integration hell this is when everything that can break breaks and first up why in the world is the angle of this servo wrong everything looks fine and i just don't have time so i'm gonna do a firmware patch it's just gonna correct for it so it'll go to the right angle that i want but i would really like to understand this one it can really subtly break stuff and just screw me in the future all right now why does it cut the top of my head at the right height but not the sides i've been trying to solve this since like midnight my brain isn't working very well so i'm going to sleep for a couple hours and hopefully i'll wake up with the solution because we've got like 18 hours or something until i fly out so i got some sleep and i finally found the problem i would really like to understand this one it can really subtly break stuff and just screw me in the future i at least called it right such a waste of time it's about 12 hours until i fly out and i still haven't done a haircut the stress is really starting to get to me i'm not gonna lie my plan has been to give myself a haircut before flying out but at this point there's no time to fix it if i butcher it no one wants to be seen in front of millions of people with terrible hair even if i dared i don't think it's in the cards this last issue is tough these three switches are used to detect when the robot contacts your head this is how it knows where your skull is so it can cut to the right length it turns out heads are a little bit pointier than you would think and if you hit them at just the right angle none of the switches will get triggered the robot will plow into your head this keeps happening to me and it's pretty annoying i've been trying to come up with a softer fix where i strategically rotate the head of the cutter to an angle that will guarantee that the switch will hit i'm just too tired for this right now i thought i had an awesome solution using metal rods to extend the limit switches but the problem is nothing else worked for some reason it just wouldn't suck the hair up into the tube so we're pretty much out of time we're gonna do a really dirty hack this switch is wired in with the switches that detect the head so i can hold this and if matpat's head is about to get bonked by the robot i can hit it and the robot will stop and continue on i got through a dry run haircut with a little bit of help from the override i only had to hit it a couple times but without it we'd ruin the haircut time to pack it up and fly to la talk about just squeaking through the main reason i agreed to build this and fly out here is that it's for a really good cause it's a charity live stream for st jude children's research hospital they're doing really good work to advance cures and prevention for childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases my hope is attempting a robotic haircut on matpat will generate some interest and raise some money it's all for a really good cause so if you have the means please consider donating it is the day the robot was giving me a ton of problems last night i rewired stuff i fixed some serious software problems i think it works now we're going live a month of hard work and lost sleep coming to a point please robot don't fail me now keep your hands feet and head inside the right at all time people have asked me if the robot really talks of course my job in the moment was supposed to be an entertainer but my secret job was to make sure the robot didn't crush matt and i almost failed did they put product in your hair it's really having a hard time uh sucking your hair into the tube oh no is that bad oh yeah your hair is like a brick give it a little tussle i thought the robot was struggling because the hair was too stiff from whatever product was in there but i realized later that whatever was in there made the hair clock up the vacuum system i really wish i would have foreseen that but i never would have it was still really fun and a bunch of money was raised for good cause so i'm gonna call it a win everything but the haircut that was a fail you don't want to go toward the mirror right now we saved attempting to cut the saint jude logo into matt pat's hair for the very end cutting the logo takes a page out of old school tv technology to produce an image an old school tv scans out a point of light very fast down a series of lines as it scans out the lines it changes the brightness of the point of light according to the image that it's trying to display and doing this with a haircut robot is very similar we can scan out a series of rows with the trimmer and instead of brightness we can adjust the length of the hair i'm going with black and white either there's hair or approximately no hair i was really happy to be saving this for the end because the odds of it working were very low the trimmer is too stiff if it doesn't approach your head perfectly perpendicular it won't sit flat against your head when that happens it just doesn't really cut very well i was willing to settle for a faintly discernible outline this would have been straightforward to fix but there just wasn't enough time and i had to focus on the haircut the show was running over time so we started the trim but then cut it as a cliffhanger which is perfect for me because it didn't seem to be working very well and this is a way for me to get off scot-free although i guess i'm telling everyone that right now i would have loved to have seen a totally sick fade and a logo cut on the live stream that's the nature of doing it live as they say there's plenty of more hair in the sea starting with mine and my brothers don't worry we're going to get a logo cut although before i let the robot go to town on me i want to fix a couple things the first thing i want to fix is the don't kill matt button i just don't like it i'm replacing the switches with a big plate trigger the way it works is if anything pushes on the plate it triggers these switches and there's just no way to hit this without it going off and the other problem to fix with the logo trimmer being too stiff i came up with a full suspension mount that lets it move laterally and rotate even if your head has a pothole this should be able to handle it all right it's time to do this for real no hair gel triple checked all right do you want 18 year old douche tuber whatever that means it doesn't matter i'll go with 18 year old what dog mode he'll thank me when he makes it a poodle trimmer this machine is a lot less scary than the old one although it helps that i brought a mirror this time so i could see what was going on i'm not going to dwell on this one because it's pretty similar to my previous robot haircut so overall not the best haircut i've ever had but it did cut around the ears a lot better than the last one have you ever seen like a redneck kid haircut it's usually like a mohawk that goes into a giant bushy rat tail it gave me one of those i don't know what the deal is on closer inspection it just didn't cut there at all it's a software bug but it's a long story it's a little short but that's kind of my fault the style is me painting on a 3d head so i got what i painted basically it's great to see that it can cut hair but what i really want to know is can it cut a pattern into your head my brother's coming over so i'm going to try to convince him to let me put him in the machine it just seems really important humanity deserves to know but why why do they deserve to know i don't think you understand me it's for humanity well i love humans we're gonna start by giving him a shorter haircut to cut someone's hair that isn't mine and so we can better see the pattern that the robot attempts to cut into it oh that haircut i like considering yeah yeah okay slight technical error i did the fade the opposite direction of this natural part and it doesn't want to go that way like at all that's fine the only thing anyone cares about is the pattern anyway the goal is to cut this pattern into his hair it's simple and will probably end up being a meta commentary on the haircut itself on the scale of mona lisa to just kill me it's looking like we're leaning a little bit towards just kill me but stuff is happening all right let's see how it looks yeah you can kind of tell [Music] oh goodness [Music] so remove some hair yeah i look like i have a disease yeah i need a little bit more humanity the pattern carving leaves a small amount to be desired how do you rank your haircut the overall general haircut is honestly not bad especially the fact is done by a robot now when it comes to the shaving of the head i personally would give this a one the fact that it was done by a robot and i've moved my head somewhat so it's your fault however the results deserve a one i mean it kind of looks like it there's a horrible accident that combined the eyeball and the the nose we're gonna bring in the impartial judge the wife okay so from this side i'd say like an eight or a nine how would you rate it one also i see the inspiration but it's execution was full yeah so when you go to a gallery and you look at piece of art and you say this thing is ugly then you read the story behind it and you say wow the story behind this art makes it valuable it's art anyone who says anything otherwise they just don't understand art i'm still not satisfied with the results i realized i still have one more head of hair i can try this out on my hair i'm pretty sure the problem my brother was having was that his head was moving around too much so i made this kind of uh apparatus which will hold my head extremely still the nose hole isn't for breathing if it's pushing against my nose then the angle of my head isn't very well defined and i want this to be rock solid this has got to be one of the dumbest things i've done but it is so satisfying when it finally works so i finally succeeded on my mission and things have happened to my hair the big question is what do you think of it oh my gosh um if you wanted a face on your head it did that sort of is your face right now what would you rate this haircut it is creative but looks dumb i see why i married you okay a five i think she's being nice yeah i'm being nice so if you're so proud of it where are you gonna wear that hat it's cold i did this image because it was simple and easy to tell if it worked with a few more tweaks to the mechanics and better software i think it could do some pretty good images i need to find something suitable for testing it that isn't my head i tried carpet teddy bears fur fabric and nothing would work hundreds if not thousands of people have asked me to make my hair cutting robot a real product but it just isn't good enough you saw what it did to my hair i just don't really see it the reviews are rolling in for cuts made here and they're they're a little mixed but before i get to those i need to talk about this video's sponsor now you can just skip to the end and check out the reviews if you want but if you do want to help support these videos and making future things checking out the sponsorships is a really good way to help out have you noticed that my videos have improved over time a lot of that improvement has to do with continual learning which is why i'm excited about this video's sponsor skillshare i try to spend at least 30 minutes a day reading textbooks or watching online courses skillshare is geared towards creative topics and they have thousands of courses across web development graphic design running a business and they're constantly adding new courses and unlike random videos from the web it's curated and specifically designed for learning also no ads so here's an example my video lighting game was terrible skillshare has a class called film lighting made simple by dan dan lu in less than 25 minutes i learned the foundational elements of film lighting did you know that collecting all the random lights in your house and pointing them at yourself is not a good film lighting technique well i do now and i also know what people are talking about when they say things like key light and negative fill i've found that continual learning has a compounding effect similar to compounding interest skills build on top of skills and you get huge gains over the years it's a fantastic investment in yourself it's also a really good way to invest in someone that you love and give them a gift that has actual long-term value skillshare is less than ten dollars a month with an annual subscription that's less than the cost of pretty much any book and the first 1000 people to click the link in the description will get a free trial of skillshare premium so check it out build those skills future you will thank you i guarantee it all right the moment of truth what did people think about their cuts made here if i'm reading this right matt pat would like us to try again well matt i would be honored to ruin your hair what a great review it's so refreshing to see someone who's authentic and willing to share it with the world you know when they talk about firing your customers these are the kind of people they're talking about they're totally unreasonable and they'd love nothing more than to see you perish nice another five star review people love this place if you like this video please consider subscribing it helps me out a lot and it'll keep you in the loop when i release version three of this robot or whatever other semi-deranged thing i come up with you can support these projects directly by joining my patreon you'll also get some behind-the-scenes info and one other thing i have a new year's resolution i build lots of stuff but a lot of it isn't that useful my goal for 2021 is to make a portion of my projects attempts to solve actual real world problems the reason i'm telling you this is that i want to make sure my list of potential problems is as complete as possible so if you know of a problem that affects people that you think maybe i could come up with a proof of concept for leave a comment i'll be keeping track of all the things people say and hopefully in 2021 we'll have some neat proof of concepts that maybe turn into something who knows thanks [Music]

Channel: Stuff Made Here

Views: 3,323,068

Rating: 4.9525266 out of 5

Keywords: stuff made here, haircut robot, invention, quarantine haircut, robotics, engineering, incredible inventions

Id: WQ8Xgp8ALFo

Length: 21min 42sec (1302 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 22 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/nadoby]

may there will be v3 of this robot.

[u/mcqua007]

If this worked well this would be a billion dollar idea. Haven’t watched the vid yet but will