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People & CultureEnvironment

‘My robot has run away’: robotic vacuum cleaner ‘disappears’ for a week, sending Chinese owner into a spin as social media laughs out loud

  • When a Chinese man’s smart vacuum cleaner ‘malfunctioned’, he appealed to social media for help and got it in hilarious form
  • China’s smart home market has exploded in recent years. In 2022, it was worth a massive US$95 billion

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Help! My robot is missing. Chinese man causes much hilarity on mainland social media after he appealed for help to find his “smart” vacuum cleaner which “disappeared” for a week. Photo: SCMP composite/Handout
Yuanyue Dangin Beijing

It is well known that China is at the forefront of all things artificial intelligence (AI), but what happens when your robot goes AWOL?

That is exactly what happened earlier this month, and the mystery disappearance of a certain member of the Internet of Things has been pre-occupying mainland social media – specifically the Xiaohongshu platform – ever since.

On March 11, an internet user with an IP address in the Chinese capital Beijing posted that his robotic vacuum cleaner had been “lost for a week”.

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The user, who is marked in his profile as a male, said that he had not been able to find the robot since it used its AI to ask him for “help” a week before the post.

The owner looked high and low for the robot vacuum cleaner over the course of a week and concluded it had “run away”. Photo: Shutterstock
The owner looked high and low for the robot vacuum cleaner over the course of a week and concluded it had “run away”. Photo: Shutterstock

The poster said he could find no sign of the robot under the bed, the sofa, behind the curtains, on the balcony or in the kitchen.

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