Robot vacuum tries to suck up sleeping woman

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Paramedics work to free a woman from the grips of her robot vacuum. Photo: Changwon Fire Service
Paramedics work to free a woman from the grips of her robot vacuum. Photo: Changwon Fire Service

Robot vacuums might be having a moment.

Should sales suddenly spike, it may be because of the unintentional endorsement from a South Korean woman, who made news when her hair got sucked up by her robot vacuum.

The woman had to make a “desperate” call to her local fire department and paramedics spent about a half-hour trying to free her hair, according to the newspaper Kyunghyang Shinmun.

While such a device allows you to nap while your floors get cleaned, its seems like a bad idea to sleep in its path.

The woman set her vacuum to begin its chores and laid down on the floor, waking to the sound of the vacuum ingesting her hair.

“The robot vacuum came around her relaxing on the floor, and suddenly sucked her hair into its nozzle,” according to a story published in The Korea Bizwire. “The vacuum stopped running one to to minutes after the sudden hair intake.”

While most devices have sensors to detect obstacles, paramedics with the Changwon Fire Service believe the woman’s robot vacuum mistook her hair for debris, the Korea Bizwire story reported.

Sensing a public relations crisis, iRobot, the makers of the popular Roomba, released a statement to The Daily Dot on Monday, saying the rogue hair-eating vacuum was not an iRobot product.

According to the International Federation of Robotics, about 4 million service robots for personal and domestic use, which includes floor cleaners and lawn-mowing robots, were sold in 2013, up 28 percent from 2012.

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