MOE-Hair: Toward Soft and Compliant Contact-rich Hair Manipulation and Care

Hair-care robots have the potential to alleviate labor shortages in elderly care and enable those with limited mobility to express their identities through hair styling. In this work, we highlight two advantages that soft robotic manipulators have in hair-care applications: safety through mechanical compliance and sensing through observing deformation. To demonstrate these advantages, we introduce a soft robotic end-effector which we call Multi-finger Omnidirectional End-effector (MOE) for hair-care applications. We validate that in hair-grasping tasks, MOE exerts 74.1% less force on the head while being able to grasp a similar amount of hair compared to rigid grippers. We further demonstrate that we can reliably estimate the mesh shape of MOE during interaction with a head and that we can infer useful information about the head such as its occluded shape. The results suggest that soft robots are uniquely advantaged in hair-care tasks.