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Apparently, Roomba owners who also own dogs have long had a problem: if the dog poops on the floor, its useful robot vacuum just passes over it and smears it out in the living room.
So iRobot decided to create a visual detection model to help Roombas recognize and avoid dog poop.
According to the iRobot promo video and this story in Techcrunch, that involved building over 100 physical models of dog poop and sending employees home to photograph them on the floor of their home:
“The glorious career of roboticists may not have been fully realized when we sent people home and created hundreds of poo models,” CEO Colin Angle recently told me. “Send people out to photograph and create synthetic poo models. I don’t know how many tens of thousands of images of all different shapes and sizes of synthetic images were needed, but this is clearly not demo code. . ” [snip]
“You can imagine, we probably tried to develop a database large enough with both real images, images of fake poo and synthetic images made from poo to serve as a training model for our robot. “, adds Angle.
All of this brings us to the Official Pet Owner’s Promise (POOP), which guarantees a free return for the new j7 + if Roomba encounters (and ends) a poo problem. For now, however, iRobot is strictly adhering to the old adage that let the yellow soften. “We can’t pee,” Angle says. “It must have 3D aspects.”
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