#Straight shave video professional

“One is fault-tolerance of the components themselves (software, electronics, etc.) and the second is the quality of the perception and planning algorithms.”

“There are two parts to this,” he explains. “That’s one of the reasons we decided to make this video,” Whitney says. “I can’t show someone how something feels, so the next best thing is to show a delicate task that either from experience or intuition makes it clear to the viewer that the system must have these properties-otherwise the task wouldn’t be possible.”Īnd as for when Whitney might be comfortable getting shaved by a robotic system without a human in the loop? It’s going to take a lot of work, as do most other hard problems in robotics.

#Straight shave video professional

“This was the first time I’d ever been shaved by someone (something?!) else with a straight razor,” he told us, and while having a professional barber at the helm was some comfort, “the lack of feeling and control on my part was somewhat unsettling.” Whitney says that the barber, Jesse Cabbage of Dentes Barbershop in Somerville, Mass., was surprised by how well he could feel the tactile sensations being transmitted from the razor. If Whitney looked a little bit nervous to you, that’s because he was. Here’s the video it’s part of a longer talk, but it should start in the right spot, at about 23:30. But, rest assured that Whitney lived long enough to answer our questions after. It’s not an autonomous robotic straight-razor shave (because Whitney is not totally crazy), but it’s a step in that direction, and requires that the hardware Whitney developed be dead reliable. But that didn’t stop Whitney from putting his whiskers where his mouth is and letting his robotic system mediate the ministrations of a professional barber. Also not ideal for those worried about safety is that as part of the process the razor ends up in distressingly close proximity to things like the artery that is busily delivering your brain’s entire supply of blood, which is very close to the top of the list of things that most people want to keep blades very far away from.

Now, a straight razor is sort of like a safety razor, except with the safety part removed, which in fact does make it significantly less safe for humans, much less robots. Whitney is now at Northeastern University, in Boston, and he recently gave a talk at the RSS workshop on “ Reacting to Contact,” where he suggested that straight razor shaving would be an interesting and valuable problem for robotics to work toward, due to its difficulty and requirement for an extremely high level of both performance and reliability. Photo: John Peter Whitney/Northeastern University Before testing the robot on Whitney’s face, they used his arm for a quick practice (bottom). These actuators use tubes containing a fluid (like air or water) to transmit forces from a primary robot to a secondary robot in a very efficient way that also allows for either compliance or very high fidelity force feedback, depending on the compressibility of the fluid.īarber meets robot: Boston based barber Jesse Cabbage (top, right) observes the machine created by roboticist John Peter Whitney. This particular roboticist who sees straight-razor face shaving as a hard problem that robots should be solving is John Peter Whitney, who we first met back at IROS 2014 in Chicago when (working at Disney Research) he introduced an elegant fluidic actuator system. Or using a straight razor to shave someone’s face without Sweeney Todd-izing them. Challenges like the DRC and SubT have helped (and are still helping) to catalyze major advances in robotics, but not all hard problems require a massive amount of DARPA funding-sometimes, a hard problem can just be something very specific that’s really hard for a robot to do, especially relative to the ease with which a moderately trained human might be able to do it.