Design and Evaluation of a Hair Combing System Using a General-Purpose Robotic Arm

TL;DR

This paper presents a modular robotic system that automates hair combing, aiding individuals with limited mobility by integrating segmentation, path planning, and trajectory execution, and demonstrates its effectiveness through user evaluations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel modular system enabling general-purpose robots to perform hair combing, combining segmentation, path planning, and trajectory control for assistive tasks.

Findings

System effectively combs various hairstyles

Quantitative evaluation with 48 users shows successful path planning

Qualitative assessment with 30 users confirms system usability

Abstract

This work introduces an approach for automatic hair combing by a lightweight robot. For people living with limited mobility, dexterity, or chronic fatigue, combing hair is often a difficult task that negatively impacts personal routines. We propose a modular system for enabling general robot manipulators to assist with a hair-combing task. The system consists of three main components. The first component is the segmentation module, which segments the location of hair in space. The second component is the path planning module that proposes automatically-generated paths through hair based on user input. The final component creates a trajectory for the robot to execute. We quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of the paths planned by the system with 48 users and qualitatively evaluate the system with 30 users watching videos of the robot performing a hair-combing task in the physical world. The system is shown to effectively comb different hairstyles.