I made a hair cutting machine

so i look very silly in this machine and the reason i'm in here is that the longer i go without cutting my hair the younger i look if you base my age on the youtube comments on my videos i'm somewhere between a 14 and 16 year old boy and the other thing that people are saying is that i look like the reference model for the lego minifig i'm not really seeing the resemblance but it's time to cut my hair i would rather not have someone cut my hair who's touching 100 other people's heads all day long so i built this robot and it is a hair cutting robot it's going to cut my hair the hard way using scissors no trimmers or any easy mode like that and i think it works so i don't know because i still have all my hair i haven't tested it yet and i'm a little bit worried because the initial trials with the dummy didn't go totally smoothly but i think i've mostly worked out those software bugs i did a quick dry run just a little bit before this just to see if everything was working without cutting and it had this other problem of ripping my hair out wow i've fixed it now the fingers clamp a lot less hard than it did before i'm glad i tested that and even if this thing gives me a terrible haircut i still feel like i've won how many people have a robot made haircut it's basically art my prediction is that it's going to give me somewhere between completely terrible and a 5 haircut well i've put this off as long as i possibly can so this is the first haircut that it's ever going to attempt so let's do it [Music] so how about that weather i don't know i mean i guess it's warm out oh well cool you can tell from my face that i wasn't sure if it was completely wrecking my hair or not i honestly was not sure if this was gonna work because it was a hard problem so the hard part even with the robot is handling the hair the hair wants to go all over the place and what you need to do is separate out a very local chunk of hair and you don't want to have any other hair trapped in that chunk and so that's what a lot of the combing and finger work that stylists are doing it's to separate out the hairs i knew in my heart that trying to build a robot that works like a stylist to separate out hair was a bad idea i still tried to do it that way initially before i go way off the deep end into the details i need to take care of just a little bit of housekeeping so i'm 90 sure what i want to build next i want to hit a baseball really far like really far it just sounds like good old-fashioned fun to me i'm excited because i found the perfect thing to put some extra pep into my swing this is a device which shoots nails into concrete using basically bullets so that's cool i'm super aware of the safety considerations here i'm going to do this very carefully in a very safe way so no need to tell me to be safe in the comments but if you want to you can if that sounds as awesome to you as it does to me you should subscribe to follow along and see how it goes and then these videos are very time consuming and expensive to make if you want to help support making more awesome things and more videos you can check out the patreon and in exchange i'm giving more behind the scenes content probably the coolest thing is the discord server i'm having a whole lot of fun hanging out in there with people and getting advice on my projects alright that's enough of that back to the fun stuff how about they sports team i mean i don't think there really are any right now right oh well cool the first concept that i was trying to do involved two combs and do a complicated series of motions to select just the hair that i want i even designed the mechanism to do it and it was pretty cool the problem was i just couldn't find a way to do this reliably without some kind of camera to see what's going on but ultimately trying to figure out where the hair is with the camera is a nightmare of phd proportions i think to try this would be insane i told you that's an insane design it's way too hard you need to pull out the essential things that it needs to do and then design a way to do them that's easier for a robot the way to go here is a vacuum it's gonna make life a lot easier yeah so as he's so rudely interjected i did have some alternate ideas that at least on paper seemed a good bit easier since when does rude dove good ideas you know i'm really looking forward to seeing you stick your big head into this robot my head no you're the one with the bad ideas anyway i came up with another way of grabbing hair that uses a vacuum that is a whole lot easier than i was going to do before the vacuum sucks all the hair straight up and then if i slide two fingers in i get just the hair that i want and no hair from the sides the way the cutter head turned out to do this is pretty cool it only takes three servos so here's the fingers the scissors are on a little stage driven by a servo and then the scissors are actuated by another servo so putting these things together i can move the fingers grab some hair lift up and then cut unfortunately this wig hair is it's like wire so the scissors can't cut it this is unfortunate because i wanted to test it on a wig but it doesn't work so i'm going to have to be the first real haircut this explains the sense of impending doom in the pit of my stomach do anything fun this weekend it was really sad my dog died oh well cool the other big challenge of this haircutting attachment is how do i move it to all the different locations on the head and so what i did is rather than having a three axis system i have an arm that can move in and out and up and down only and so it can reach the face and they can reach the head then i rotate the entire head so i can reach the side i just rotate the head now i'm touching the side and so rotating the head is hard because i have to rotate my whole body i do the equivalent thing which i rotate the entire robot around the head i always need to be pointing at the head when i cut so i'm cutting on the top i need the scissors to be pointing this way if i'm kind of on the side maybe pointing this way and so i added a whole extra rotational mechanism to the to the robot gantry to allow this one other problem that i ran into that really annoyed me because it just made things way more complicated is that depending on where you're cutting on the head you want the scissors to be going different directions so when i cut the bangs i want to be cutting across the head i don't want to be cutting vertically if i cut vertically i'm going to end up with a diagonal sawtooth bangs which is going to make me look like a complete idiot so i added a whole new access to my robot that allows me to rotate the cutter head this machine is made with a bunch of different techniques the first is plasma cut and folded sheet metal you can see the plasma cutter is drawing these marker lines and that's so i can bend the parts very accurately so they fit together later some of the plasma cut parts are spot welded together and you can see i'm using a little access port so that i can reach the spot welds inside this thing there was only one machine part and that was because i was able to 3d print pretty much everything this is great because they're complicated shapes which have been very difficult to make everything is built on top of this giant bearing which is what my head goes through and then there's a simple two axis gantry i need to cut a hole in a sheet of plywood which this cnc router i just got would be perfect for but it's not set up so i had to make a tool to do it using your tools to make new tools is one of life's great pleasures anyway so it was fun and then everything rides in this stand i built which bolts to my workbench so electrically there's really not that much interesting there's four big stepper drivers which are responsible for controlling different motors there's a microcontroller it's a teensy that's running the show it's communicating with the computer for receiving commands and all that stuff it is a giant mess but there's nothing like a good facade to give the impression that everything is okay all right how you feeling i'm a mess i mean i am good thanks how are you can't beat a facade when can i cut your wife's hair it's not gonna happen trust me i tried all right what if i give you a haircut that is a super set of another haircut that you want then if something goes wrong we can cut your hair down to another haircut what do you mean if something goes wrong i mean i don't plan on anything going wrong it's just it's a prototype and sometimes stuff happens i already like my hair but come on it's important it's for humanity humanity again yeah there's all these people stuck at home in quarantine and they want to look good how does getting my haircut help it just does that doesn't make any sense just put your head in the robot it's that easy you just put it in and it'll cut it my analysis is that you've made yourself into the man who cried wolf even if you really mean well you're not going to be able to convince where did that come from oh well cool one of the big challenges of getting this robot to work is that it needs to know where my head is in order to cut the right length if my head is here it's going to cut a different length than if my head is here your head moves around a good bit and i'd rather not have every little movement that my head does baked into my haircut i spent way too much time trying to get this depth camera working so this is an intel realsense depth camera and what i was doing is doing facial recognition to find where my head is and then combining with the depth data to figure out where my head is in 3d space but there was a really big problem with this switch this camera is completely blocked by this stand a lot of the time even when it's not directly in front of it it really blocks it and i could maybe deal with that but it makes the software so much more complicated i just didn't think it was worth it what i ended up doing is i put a little switch on these fingers and this allows me to move and sense when it hits my head and then i can use that to measure a bunch of different points on my head and figure out roughly where it is so say i get a little bit too comfortable in here and i kind of move over to the side it knows because it has this probe move back move back move back go ahead all right we're back in business how do you tell a robot what haircut you want the way that i solved this problem is i took a 3d model of a head and i painted on it the haircut that i want basically lighter is longer darker shorter at first glance this looks like i want to be a balding man but it actually makes sense to the robot the other thing i have to tell the robot is what angle to cut at because i wanted to cut my bangs horizontally and i wanted to cut around my ears so this isn't telling the robot that i want a giant unibrow this time the robot cut the bangs horizontally and then cut around my ear the robot will load this 3d model and then knowing how big of an area the scissors cut it will compute a plan of the minimum number of locations it needs to cut at to make my hair the desired length and then as it's doing that plan it'll cut one and then go the next one in the next one at each location it will check the unibrow model to see if it should cut at a specific angle and if so it'll do that at least that's the plan in theory i haven't done it yet hopefully it works but we're doing it live so here's the whole haircut from start to finish heads up i look completely insane in this time lapse i think it's a weird time lapse artifact but also i was terrified of it ruining my hair so it's probably also a bit of fear midway through i realized there was a bug in my code that made it cut about six times as many locations on my head as it needed to i thought it was taking a while so it took about an hour but it should only take more like 15 minutes every time the robot goes to cut a location it probes to find where my head is at and then the length that it cuts is relative to where it probed this is the main reason it could maintain accurate hair lengths even though i was moving around so you can see the vacuum sucking a bunch of extra hair into the tube but the fingers that grab the hair have little guards on them that keep hair that they aren't grabbing from being cut making this robot hit the desired location on my head was pretty hard not only does it have a bunch of joints that are somewhat challenging to compute where the heck the scissors are going to go my head is moving and then the design of the robot doesn't allow it to approach my head from all possible angles i have to find the best achievable angle that the robot can do i have a suspicion my math isn't always correct but thankfully my hair all turned out the right length all right the cut is done what did the salon's first customer have to say all right two out of ten not great zero personality i can believe that top and sides are cut well nice nice but it gave me a mullet what the robot cut the hairs that it could reach really well but there's two problems the first is it can't get close enough to my ear so i have all this hair right by my ears that's really long that should be pretty easy and fast to clean up but the big problem is it gave me a robotically perfect mullet so it just couldn't get quite low enough to cut the last maybe inch of the back of my hair i had planned to have it rotate which dropped it by about an inch maybe an inch and a half but the scissors interfere with the stand and it just couldn't do it so i said i thought it was gonna give me a five dollar haircut i think that was right i think even for five dollars they don't normally give you a mullet man thank goodness i didn't prank my wife with this machine because i had to just go give her a pair of scissors and ask her to fix my hair i'm actually really happy it gave me the mullet there's just something deeply satisfying about a robot giving me a perfect mullet all she did was cut those off she didn't touch the top at all and overall i'd say it's really not bad i checked some of the lengths they seem right on and i'd pay five dollars for this haircut i don't get another shot at cutting my hair for a month or two but i think i might try to upgrade this to cut closer to the ears to not generate perfect mullets and then maybe also add a trimmer or something like that so that it can do the neckline for me so hopefully you enjoyed this there's a fun project thanks for watching you

Channel: Stuff Made Here

Views: 4,910,585

Rating: 4.9405866 out of 5

Keywords: hair cut, build, awesome inventions, haircut, robot, 3d printing, 3d printed, how two, arduino projects, diy projects, technology, engineering, make, maker, build video, stuff made here, quarantine, stylist, funny robot, robot fail, funny robot testing, awesome inventions at home, arduino projects robot, diy projects mechanical, engineering explained, haircuts for men, hair cutting, quarantine haircut

Id: 7zBrbdU_y0s

Length: 13min 17sec (797 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/LilWienerBigHeart]

this is insane.

[u/_coolranch]

My first thought was literally "No......"

Update: "robotically perfect mullet" LOL

[u/TreehouseAndSky]

That must take so ... much ... time. Amazing

[u/RealStoneyBologna]

It sucks as it cuts!
It certainly does suck!

[u/yama_knows_karma]

Why not just get a flowbee?

[u/whereisfoster]

/r/nonononoyes

[u/DJQuad]

Jimmy Neutron tier invention

[u/stovenn]

This demonstrates why hair-dressing will remain a "safe-from-robot-takeover" career option for a few more years (once they get around the plague-social-distancing problem).

Personally I think that VR-enabled DIY haircutting is the way to go (once they get around the headset strap interference problem).