Originally published at: iRobot built over 100 models of dog poop to train Roomba's visual AI | Boing Boing
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this leads us to Pet Owner Official Promise (P.O.O.P.), which guarantees a free return for the new j7+ if the Roomba runs into (and over) a poop problem
I don’t know that the Post Office would be on board with this.
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All that wasted effort when they could have built a roomba that scoops poop, not an AI that can figure out how to avoid the dirty jobs.
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Now if they could get it to smear the words “Take me outside already won’t you??” That would be something.
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Does it have an on off option?
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Fools! It doesn’t work unless you use real dog poop! The AI won’t know what to make of the real thing.
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That’s something that goes on the ol’ resume.
I tried doing a LinkedIn search for “Dog Poop Modeler” and got no results though.
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What does it do if one surrounds the roomba with pieces of faux-crap*? “Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage”
(*or real pieces, if one is properly perverse; £6.78 for an assortment of fake dog poop)
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Any chance cat barf is next on the list?
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Why would a Roomba drive over anything as big as a piece of dog poo though? Wouldn’t it be simpler to just have it avoid anything taller than .5" tall? I mean, what is anywhere near the size of dog poo that should be vacuumed? It seems like more often than not it would be vacuuming up something you didn’t want vacuumed.
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Someone made a commercial based upon the concept of this “Failure Mode #2.”
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Ummm…pot kettle black…
The door saddles in our old apartment were sometimes well over .5” because they were solid wood and in a 100+ yo building that had settled unevenly. I thought for sure that the Roomba my mom got us for Christmas (that we named Zeroth 
), would be confined to one room as a result, but it did a brilliant job finding the right angle to climb over them. We are not carpet and rug people, but I imagine that this would present a similar issue, especially for true wool rugs with slip mats underneath that can end up being quite thick.
I originally considered a Roomba to be a silly, overpriced, single use item, but oh my god, they are so damn good at what they do! So much more effective than even sweeping and mopping because it gets into all of those hidden spots where things really accumulate and add to the general sense of filth. I can run it while I’m doing other tasks like the dishes and by the time I’m done, the floor looks amazing. They’re also brilliantly designed to be user-serviceable with “floating” parts that help them avoid breaking critical components like wheels and brush mounts. I don’t think I’ve ever been as impressed with a piece of technology before.
*The content of this post has not been sponsored or approved by iRobot.
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Human loathing… having to remove the pet hair tangled up so badly the device is no longer functional. 
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Looking at them, couldn’t they have just used various sausages?
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A robot can’t scoop what it doesn’t recognize.
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