“I remember coming into my office and it looked like a murder scene, but with poop,” Darby said Thursday.
In her office, she said, the Roomba ran over a power cord and then continued circling in circles, leaving footprints reminiscent of crop circles. They threw a carpet, power cords and, after her husband tried and failed to clean it, the Roomba.
Darby, who works in public relations, said she and her husband bought another Roomba and started using it during the day, but eventually the same thing happened again after MacGregor had another accident at the interior. (Despite the spread of Roomba poop, Darby and her husband adopted MacGregor).
The vacuum, which is initially available through the iRobot website, costs $ 850 (or $ 650 if purchased without a base where the vacuum can automatically empty dirt).
IRobot co-founder and CEO Colin Angle told CNN Business that while a power cord is the most common obstacle for a Roomba to stick, pet poop is the “most spectacularly bad. ” (Angle, who has a dog, said this has not happened in his home). The company has considered for more than five years different technologies, ranging from capacitive sensors, which can measure things like pressure, to olfactory sensors, which detect odors. – to detect waste, he said.
Angle said iRobot spent years building a library of poop images, real and fake. The company started, he said, buying “all the realistic gag poop you can buy on the Internet,” and then split into making hundreds of Play-doh poop models, which he painted brown and photographed with different lighting and from different angles. He thinks all iRobot employees with a pet have photographed this animal’s waste from various angles.
The vacuum has an obstacle detection camera, and image recognition algorithms trained in the iRobot dataset can determine if that obstacle appears to be poop. Then a smartphone app can alert the owner of the vacuum, along with a picture of the mess (or power cord). Angle said that whenever an obstacle is detected, a user can decide, through the application, whether to contribute the image to the iRobot training data.
He said the company is confident enough in the vacuum capacity to prevent pet waste that will replace J7 + vacuum cleaners that can go deep, eh, doo-doo.
“We felt this was an important part of conveying our conviction that we have it under control,” Angle said.
Darby is thinking of buying the j7 +. He said his family, who have since gone through several more Roombes, could use a new one.