A prime candidate for secular canonisation – and a personal hero of mine – is Frances Gabe. She was a visionary, a terrible neighbour (she antagonised hers with a succession of snarling great danes and a penchant for nude DIY) and the inventor of the self-cleaning home. Gabe, who died in 2016 at 101, transformed her Oregon bungalow into a "giant dishwasher", with a system of sprinklers, air dryers and drains, plus self-cleaning sinks, bath and toilet. "Housework is a thankless, unending job," Gabe said. I agree with Gabe – and with Lenin, who condemned housework as "barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying and crushing drudgery".

Using a robot vacuum has always been a bit hazardous for pet owners. Leaving a robovac to do its thing in your absence can be a problem if your less-than-perfectly-trained dog or cat also does its thing while you're out. A quick Google of "Roomba dog poop" gives you some idea of what the outcome can be, as unheeding robots with spinning brushes barrel into the mess and proceed to spread it liberally around the house. But now, Roomba-maker iRobot say it's fixed this scatological problem. The company's latest robovac, the Roomba j7, uses built-in machine vision and AI to identify and avoid pet messes of all sorts.

For customer privacy, the company says the vacuum only recognizes three specific objects: cords, pet droppings and its charging base. Angle says the software automatically shuts off the camera if it detects a human or photo of a human within view, and finds a human-free angle to capture. He also says the firm will never sell user data: Images taken by the Roomba are stored on the device, not on the cloud, unless you agree to send them to the smartphone app or to iRobot.

They're like dishwashers and microwaves in their utility and virtual invisibility--once you have one, you can't live without it. In recent years, they've all gotten a lot better at suction and navigating our strange house layouts. So how do robot vacs stand out in an increasingly crowded field? The Roborock S6 MaxV aims to explicitly address the most feared robot vacuum urban legend: dog poop. It's horrifying to watch, but many bot vacs will run into a pile of dog poop and merrily spread it all over the house without realizing it. The S6 MaxV uses a stereoscopic dual-camera system and ReactiveAI to recognize pet waste and give it a wide berth in your house.

While I prefer to walk my dogs, there have been times when the weather has been bad, or I'm just too tired at the end of the day, and they end up pooping in the yard. If you let your dog do its business on your lawn, then this new invention could be a godsend. The Beetl is a fully-autonomous robot that drives around your yard, looking for piles of poop. It then scoops them up into a container for easy and clean disposal. The robot uses computer vision to detect piles of dog doo, as well as to avoid obstacles. It can also be programmed to work strictly within the boundaries of your lawn.

An Arkansas man woke up to a horrible scene earlier this month and found that his robotic, automatic vacuum cleaner had managed to spread dog poop all throughout his house. Writing in a Facebook post last week that has since gone viral, Jesse Newton described a morning when his child came to sleep in the bed with him and his wife as he notices that something stunk. Newton said he walked into his living room at some time after 3 a.m. and found that his Roomba, which is set to vacuum each night at 1:30 a.m., had run over dog poop his puppy had left behind. He called it the "Pooptastrophe." Newton said he saw dog poop on "every conceivable surface" and the sight closely resembled a "Jackson Pollock poop painting."