Haircut Robot: Clippers, Flowbee and ABB Cobots

A haircut robot sounds simple until you list what a barber does: reads the head, lifts hair with a comb or fingers, cuts with scissors or clippers a few millimetres from the skin, and keeps blades away from the ears and neck while the client moves. This post follows haircutting from the barber's chair and the first hand clippers to vacuum cutters like the Flowbee and a home-built robot that cut its maker's hair in 2020. Then it looks at this year's viral fake machines and motion-capture barbers, and at where ABB cobots such as GoFa could fit, which today is only a possibility.

A barber in a face mask trims a client's hair with clippers at a barber shop in 2019. Photo: Gilangpnp / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How barbers went from shears to clippers and the Flowbee

For most of history a haircut meant scissors, a comb and a razor in a barber's hands. The tool that sped it up came from a barber too. Around 1855 the Serbian barber Nikola Bizumić invented manual hair clippers: a pair of toothed blades driven by squeezing and releasing two handles, which let a barber cut hair close and fast. Barber shops in the early 1900s, like the ones in the National Photo Company collection at the Library of Congress, still ran on that mix of hand clippers, shears and straight razors, with the barber standing and the customer tipped back in a heavy chair.

A pair of manual hair clippers, worked by squeezing and releasing the handles. Photo: Alan J Truhan / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5)

Electricity came next. Leo J. Wahl in Sterling, Illinois, started out with a hand-held massager made at his uncle's plant, spent more than a decade refining an electric clipper for barbers and patented his final design in 1921, when the firm became the Wahl Clipper Corporation. Mathew Andis Sr. entered the business the same year and sold clippers door to door with his wife Anna, and John Oster's company followed in 1928. Electric clippers made the short, even cuts of the twentieth century quick and cheap. A person still held the tool, though, read the head and decided where to stop.

A barber shop in the Investment Building, from the National Photo Company collection, 1910s to 1930s. Photo: Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The first device to take some of that judgement away used a vacuum. Rick Hunts, a carpenter in San Diego, filed a patent for the Flowbee in 1986 and began selling it in 1988. A hose pulls hair through spacers that set the length, a cutting head trims whatever sticks through, and the clippings end up in the vacuum. Hunts sold the first units from his garage and at county fairs, and about two million had been sold by 2000. In 2020 the engineer and YouTuber Shane Wighton went further: his robot sucked up a lock with a vacuum, clamped it and cut it with scissors, following a 3D model of his head painted with target lengths.

A man cuts his own hair with a Flowbee vacuum haircutter in 2011. Photo: Victor Martinez / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Fake haircut machines and motion-capture barbers in 2026

No shop in 2026 offers a haircut from a robot, but the internet is full of videos of one. On 23 September 2026 Yahoo Tech carried a Lead Stories prebunk warning that clips of automatic haircut machines are made with AI tools. Earlier write-ups of the trend describe the same scene: a person picks a style on a touchscreen, puts their head into a round opening and walks out seconds later with a perfect fade. Some of the creators have said themselves that the machine does not exist. Wighton's robot was much slower: it worked one lock at a time and measured how far each lock was from the scalp before cutting.

A hair salon with barber poles at the door, photographed in 2023. Photo: Fumikas Sagisavas / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Serious efforts this year are mostly about collecting data. On 14 September the Indian industrialist Harsh Goenka posted a video on X of a barber shaving a customer while wearing a head-mounted camera, a harness with sensors and wires, and trackers on both wrists, with the caption that even barbers' jobs may soon be at risk. Recordings like that capture how a skilled hand moves a blade over skin, which is the kind of example robot learning needs. Barbers seem less worried. Barbering students in Dallas told Spectrum News on 23 September that they are learning skills AI cannot replace. We covered the shampoo side of salon robots in our post on the hair washing robot.

Students at a vocational school of barbering and hairdressing in 1953. Photo: U. A. Saarinen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

ABB does not make a haircut robot, and no source shows one of its arms cutting hair. Its cobots do have some of what the job would need. The GoFa CRB 15000 carries up to 5 kg, reaches 950 mm and has torque sensors in all six joints, so it can feel contact and stop, and it can be moved by hand to teach a path. The dual-arm YuMi IRB 14000 was built for small-parts assembly next to people, with two light arms that each handle about 0.5 kg. A research team could, in principle, give one arm a comb and the other a trimmer, though nobody has shown that yet.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table. Photo: ABB

What a haircut robot still has to solve

The hardest problem is safety. A haircut puts sharp blades a few millimetres from a moving head, which is very different from a cobot sanding a panel clamped to a table. ABB's SafeMove can supervise speed and keep a tool out of defined zones, and joint torque sensing can stop an arm on contact, but neither knows where an ear is. Wighton handled part of this by refusing to cut close to his ears and neck. Any commercial machine would need testing under ISO 13482, the safety standard for personal care robots, and a way to stop at once when a client turns, coughs or sneezes.

A worker moves a GoFa arm by hand; the cobot stops when it senses contact. Photo: ABB

The second problem is the hair itself. Straight, curly, coily, thick and fine hair all behave differently, and a good barber changes technique for each. A camera can map a head, and a 3D model with target lengths, like Wighton's, tells the robot what to leave. Teaching the cutting motion is harder. Motion-capture recordings of barbers could give learning systems examples, and the paths would then be checked in simulation, the way industrial programs are first built and tested in RobotStudio, long before any blade comes near a person.

ABB's dual-arm YuMi IRB 14000 assembling small parts beside a lab worker. Photo: ABB

Then there is cost. A barber with a set of clippers, a chair and a mirror is cheap compared with a certified robot cell that has to be cleaned and inspected between clients. For homes, the likely next step is a smarter version of the Flowbee idea, with length guides, a vacuum and maybe a camera to check the result. For salons, the first useful robot would probably do one narrow task, such as an even buzz cut or a clean neckline, under a barber's eye. A robot that gives a full haircut on its own is still years away.

A haircut on Skylab in 1973, with a vacuum hose held close to catch the clippings. Photo: NASA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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