Robot vacuum disasters – Can tragedy be avoided

Two years back Jesse Newton from Arkansas revealed in his Facebook post that his house was covered in dog faeces after a mishap with their robot vacuum. He said, “every conceivable surface” was left covered in his dog’s poop after it was picked up by his Roomba (an automatic robot vacuum cleaner which clean room surface). It was the cause of “Pooptastrophe”, “The poohpocalypse” and “The poopening”. Here is the excerpt from his Facebook post:

He warned that under any circumstances; do not let your robot vacuum cleaner run over dog poop. He also warned that if anything unthinkable does happen, and your vacuum cleaner runs over dog poop, it should be stopped immediately and stop it to continue the cleaning cycle. If this type of situation arises, it will spread poop over every conceivable surface within its reach, even under the bed or sofa which turns your home resembles a Jackson Pollock poop painting.

A robot vacuum which works through the sensor and clean room surface.

In the meantime, if someone in the house gets up and move on the floor, he or she suddenly will fall in the tragedy. This way horror after horror will take place in the house unless all the dirt removes from the house floor and clean with water. If the robot runs below sofa or bed, it will be very difficult to clean all these places where you cannot easily access.

In another incident in South Korea, a robot vacuum cleaner attacks woman’s hair when she was sleeping on the floor. Suddenly her hair got stuck within the robot. In that eventful day when the accident took place, she turned her robot vacuum cleaner and laid down on the floor to take rest. When it came around her, it sucked up her hair into the nozzle. Later it stopped for a minute after swallowing woman’s hair. Yet she could not rescue herself and somehow call to emergency service.

There are many tragedies we heard and experienced with almost once in a month. One person got injured after falling down on the floor seriously when his legs somehow hit with robot vacuum cleaner. Some tragedies catch media attention and some tragedies do not get a highlight. Robot vacuum cleaners are made with sensors allow them to clean room surface detecting dirt with avoiding obstacles such as people, cables, falling down stairs but not human hair or dog’s poop. It could not detect both of these and are resulted in a big tragedy.

It cannot detect dirt which is unwanted and only can remove through manual intervention. And this is the cause major disaster. Automation is the best solution to overcome any tragedy. But in case of human hair, the automation process is failed. If the sensor stops running detecting human hair, there may be a portion of human hair in the room surface. When the automation process fails manual system works.

We can avoid these tragedies only through extra care. We should not forget to remove unwanted particles from the room before running a robotic vacuum cleaner. It is always not possible to watch every activity of robot vacuum cleaner but while running robot in the room surface you need to be extra cautious and should not forget that your robot is running. There are some advantages to automation of your equipment in the house, but you should not blindly rely on automation while your equipment is switched on and running mode. By this way only we can avoid big tragedy or mishap.