IRobot cofounder and CEO Colin Angle told CNN Business that while a power cord is the most common obstacle for a Roomba to get caught on, pet poop is "the most spectacularly bad" obstacle. The company has considered for more than five years different technologies — ranging from capacitive sensors, which can measure things like pressure, to olfactory sensors, which detect odor — for detecting waste, he said.
Angle said iRobot spent years building a library of pictures of poop, real and faux. The company began, he said, by buying "all the realistic gag poop you can buy on the internet," then branched out into making hundreds of Play-doh poop models, which it painted brown and photographed in different lighting and from different angles. He thinks every iRobot employee with a pet has had that animal's waste photographed from multiple angles.
He said the company is confident enough in the vacuum's ability to avoid pet waste that it will replace any j7+ vacuums that get in deep, er, doo-doo.