Jesse Newton found out the hard way what happens when a robotic vacuum cleaner encounters a dog turd, and it isn’t pretty.



Newton’s Roomba is scheduled to clean the living room of his home in Little Rock, Arkansas, at 1.30am each day, so that the family wakes up to a clean space. That all changed this month when his puppy Evie had an accident on the rug during the night, leading to what he described as the “poopocalypse”.

As Newton explains in a graphic Facebook post, the Roomba ran over the dog feces and then continued its cleaning cycle around the house, spreading the mess over “every conceivable surface” and resulting in “a home that closely resembles a Jackson Pollock poop painting”.

“It will be on your floorboards. It will be on your furniture legs. It will be on your carpets. It will be on your rugs. It will be in your kids’ toy boxes. If it’s near the floor, it will have poop on it. Those awesome wheels, which have a checkered surface for better traction, left 25ft poop trails all over the house,” he said.

Newton was helpful enough to draw a diagram.

A diagram of the Roomba ‘poopocalypse’. Illustration: Jesse Newton

It turns out that this isn’t an isolated incident.

It’s happened to neuroscientist Becca (she didn’t want her full name published) between five and 10 times over the past two years.

She and her husband bought the Roomba to tackle the hair shed by their four cats Aretha, Bert, Merry and Pippin. “It does an amazing job,” she said.

That is, until there’s a stray cat turd. Sometimes this happens when one of the cats simply misses the litter box, while at other times it’s down to the cat having “a little dangling one” that falls off somewhere in the apartment.

“It’s awful. The poop gets stuck in these tiny treads in the wheels, gets sucked inside and in all the brushes,” Becca explained. “That’s on top of the poop smeared all over the house.”

Most of the time the mess is concentrated to a small area, something that Becca credits to a feature that leads the Roomba to go over an area repeatedly if it thinks it has detected a particularly dirty spot.

“A couple of weeks ago we had this big asterisk on the floor because the Roomba was going in zigzags trying to get the spot,” she said.

Roomba. Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose/The Observer

Los Angeles marine biologist Jonathan Williams endured a similar trauma. It’s happened three times in the past few months, ever since his family moved to a house with their pug, Alice.

The first time it happened he came back from work to find “tread-marks of caked-in poop all over the house”.

The next two times were much worse. “It’s almost like [Alice the pug] deliberately left it right in front of its path at the start of the cycle.”

The last time it happened, Alice had been out in the morning and evacuated her bowels, lulling Williams and his wife into a false sense of security. “We thought it was safe and we could run it, but it seems like she was storing some up for us.”

“Quite honestly, we see this a lot,” said a spokesman from iRobot, the company that makes the Roomba.

“We generally tell people to try not to schedule your vacuum if you know you have dogs that may create such a mess. With animals anything can happen.”

Are there any plans to introduce any poop detection technology to the product? “Our engineers are always trying to figure out ways to help people with their problems, and we’ve known this is an issue people deal with.”

He suggests that it might be possible to introduce a specific sensor or feces-specific image recognition.

“I can’t say we have the solution yet but it’s certainly something our engineers are aware of.”