Hair Transplant Robot: ARTAS, FUE and ABB Cobots

A hair transplant moves follicles from the back and sides of the head, where hair keeps growing, to thinning areas on top. Done by hand, a large session means harvesting and placing thousands of tiny grafts one at a time, for hours. A hair transplant robot takes over part of that repetitive work: cameras find each follicle and an arm cuts it out at the right angle. This post covers how surgeons moved from punch plugs and strip surgery to follicular unit extraction, how the ARTAS robot works, what clinics and commentators are saying about it in 2026, and where general purpose robots such as ABB's cobots might fit.

A surgical team works on a patient during a hair transplant training session in Istanbul, 2019. Photo: ACA Academy / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How surgeons moved hair by hand

The first attempts go back well over a century. In 1897 Menahem Hodara implanted hair into scars left by favus, a scalp infection, and in 1939 a Japanese surgeon named Okuda reported clinical experiments with hair grafts, although his work stayed little known outside Japan for decades. The modern field starts with Norman Orentreich in 1959. He showed that grafts taken from the back of the head keep growing after they are moved, which he called donor dominance. His punch grafts were round plugs of scalp, each carrying a tuft of hair.

Male pattern hair loss on the crown, the condition most hair transplants treat. Photo: BlaiserPascal / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In the 1980s and 1990s surgeons gave up plugs for strip harvesting, now called follicular unit transplantation or FUT. The surgeon cuts a strip of scalp about 1 to 1.5 cm wide and 15 to 30 cm long from the back of the head and stitches the wound closed, which leaves a linear scar and takes around two weeks to heal. Technicians then split the strip into tiny grafts. In the late 1980s B. L. Limmer brought stereo microscopes into this step, so teams could cut grafts along the natural groups of one to four hairs, and sessions grew to thousands of grafts.

A surgeon during a strip harvest hair transplant, the FUT method. Photo: Hairtransplantclinic / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Follicular unit extraction, or FUE, appeared in 2002. The surgeon skips the strip and takes out each group of hairs with a punch between 0.6 and 1.0 mm across, leaving small dot scars that heal in under a week. It costs more, because every graft is a separate cut that has to follow the angle of the hair under the skin. Hours of identical, precise motions suit a machine, and on 14 April 2011 Restoration Robotics received FDA clearance for its ARTAS system to harvest follicles in men with black or brown straight hair and male pattern hair loss.

Before and right after grafts were placed into a scar on the back of a head. Photo: Micha L. Rieser / Wikimedia Commons (attribution)

ARTAS and robotic FUE in clinics today

ARTAS is a robotic FUE assistant. A multi camera stereoscopic vision system with 44 micron resolution maps the donor area, and a seven axis arm lines the punch up with each follicle before it cuts. The system also makes the recipient sites where grafts go, and the later ARTAS iX version automates implantation as well. Venus Concept, a medical aesthetics company, completed its merger with Restoration Robotics on 7 November 2019 and sells the system today. The surgeon still plans the hairline, checks each pass and decides how many grafts the patient needs.

The MCAN Health aesthetic clinic in Istanbul, one of many hair transplant clinics in Turkey, 2019. Photo: PoppyNorton / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

On 26 September 2026, Nine News in Australia reported a hair transplant robot described as the first of its kind in Queensland. A week earlier, an opinion piece in ThePrint in India asked whether robotic transplants work for women. Its answer was yes for selected patients, with the reminder that robotic hair transplant is essentially a technology assisted form of FUE. The article said the robot does not replace the surgeon, and that the big decisions still depend on whether hair loss is stable, how strong the donor area is and how many grafts are needed.

A street advertisement for a hair transplant clinic in Amsterdam, 2022. Photo: Donald Trung Quoc Don / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not build hair transplant robots, and ARTAS does not use an ABB arm. The closest ABB hardware is its small collaborative range. The single arm YuMi IRB 14050 has seven axes, a 0.5 kg payload and about 0.56 m of reach, and GoFa has torque sensors in each joint so it stops when it feels contact. A cobot like these could in principle carry a punch tool or hold a camera next to a patient's head, though an industrial robot would need medical certification before it touched anyone. Our post on eyelash extension robots looks at a similar task close to the face.

Moving an ABB GoFa cobot by hand. Torque sensors in its joints let it feel contact. Photo: ABB

What hair transplant robots still need

For patients, the main hope is a more consistent result. Manual FUE asks a team to repeat the same precise cut for hours, and a robot is built to cut the thousandth graft the same way as the first. Some limits come from the original clearance, which covered only men with straight black or brown hair. Curly, grey or very light hair is likely to be harder for a camera to follow. Women need a careful check of whether they are candidates at all, as ThePrint's article pointed out.

A hair follicle seen in a stained skin section under the microscope. Photo: Mikael Häggström / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Cost is the other barrier. A robot adds a large capital purchase and consumables to a procedure many patients pay for themselves, while manual FUE needs only hand tools and a trained team. The machine also needs people: a surgeon who understands hair growth, staff who can handle and place grafts, and someone in the clinic who keeps the system calibrated. The wider beauty industry is working through the same questions, as our post on beauty and cosmetics robots explains.

Programming a single arm YuMi with Wizard on the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

Over the next few years I would expect more automation in the parts a robot already does well, such as mapping the donor area, counting grafts and making recipient sites at a planned angle and depth. Research groups are also testing robot designs that both harvest and implant grafts. Factories that make the punches, needles and graft storage trays could use cobots like GoFa or YuMi for assembly and inspection. In the clinic, the robot will stay a tool in the surgeon's hand for some time, so patients should judge a clinic by its surgeon and results before its machine.

A GoFa cobot at ABB's healthcare research hub. Photo: ABB

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