For many people, robot vacuums like the Roomba have solved a minor nuisance by taking over a mundane household cleaning task. However, for a small number of people, those same robot vacuums have created a much, much larger problem.
If you’ve never heard of this “poop+Roomba” phenomenon, you definitely shouldn’t ever Google it and click on the results that pop up…robo vacs have a lot of moving parts, like wheels and spinning brushes. This is great if you’re driving over and picking up dry dirt, but if the robot encounters a soft mass of something that it can grind up, those spinning brushes quickly become paint rollers. Then the robot drives all over the house. It’s bad.
Roomba has apparently been working hard to avoid this horrible problem. Their newest vacuum offers a Pet Owner Official Promise (POOP), where they’ll “replace any Roomba j7+ that doesn’t avoid solid pet waste”. That’s a pretty solid offer, but if the machine fails, I think they ought to throw in a deep cleaning of your house as well.