Safety in Robotic Haircutting

Robotic haircutting is an emerging application of service robotics in which safety is paramount. Unlike conventional collaborative or domestic tasks, haircutting requires prolonged operation near the human head, one of the most vulnerable body regions, and often involves sharp or heated tools. These characteristics make safety central to both functional reliability and user acceptance. This paper reviews the safety landscape of haircutting robots by examining risks across the full task workflow and synthesizing lessons from related domains, including collaborative robotics, healthcare robotics, and autonomous systems. It proposes a three-layer framework to organize existing approaches and illustrate how safety can be embedded from hardware design to control logic. In addition, a series of proof-of-concept demonstrations illustrates the practical implementation of the proposed three-layer safety framework in representative haircutting scenarios. The paper further highlights opportunities and unresolved challenges in ensuring safe human-robot interaction in haircutting contexts, providing guidance for future research and deployment.