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“I remember walking into my office and it looked like a murder scene, but with poo,” Darby said Thursday.
In her office, she said, Roomba rolled over a power cord, then continued to circle, leaving traces reminiscent of crop circles. They threw in a rug, power cords, and, after her husband tried to clean it unsuccessfully, Roomba.
Darby, who works in public relations, said she and her husband bought another Roomba and started using it during the day, but the same sort of thing eventually happened again after MacGregor had a another accident inside. (Despite the spread of Roomba’s poo, Darby and her husband adopted MacGregor.)
The vacuum, which is initially available on the iRobot website, costs $ 850 (or $ 650 if purchased without a base in which the vacuum can automatically dump 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 get caught, animal droppings are “the obstacle. more spectacularly bad “. (Angle, who has a dog, said that hadn’t happened in his home.) The company has been considering different technologies for more than five years, from capacitive sensors, which can measure things like pressure, to sensors olfactory, which detect odors. – to detect waste, he said.
Angle said iRobot has spent years building a library of poop images, real and fake. The company started out, he said, by buying “all the realistic gag poo you can buy on the Internet,” and then branched out to make hundreds of Play-doh models of poo, which it has. painted brown and photographed in different lighting and angles. He believes that every iRobot employee with a pet had that pet’s waste photographed from multiple angles.
The vacuum has a camera to spot obstacles, and image recognition algorithms trained on the iRobot dataset can determine if that obstacle appears to be poop. A smartphone app can then alert the owner of the vacuum cleaner, along with a photo of the mess (or power cord). Whenever an obstacle is detected, Angle said, a user can decide, through the app, if they want to contribute the image to iRobot’s training data.
He said the company was confident enough in the vacuum’s ability to avoid animal waste that it would replace all j7 + vacuums that penetrate deep, uh, doo-doo.
“We thought that was an important part in conveying our belief that we have this one under control,” said Angle.
Darby plans to buy the j7 +. She said her family, who have since gone through several other Roombas, could use a new one.
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