Caz is pretty regular about his irregularities, so I can tell the Roborock to not vacuum one corner of the dining room and sleep easy, knowing it isn't going to try eat more than it can swallow.

The cats, however, being cats, are not creatures of habit.

To be fair, when a hair-ball wants to see the world, it's not going to wait for a discount tour.

Thus, I got up to find a brown smear across a black carpet.

This actually wasn't much of a problem. My spot-cleaning carpet shampooing machine made short work of de-browning the carpet, and I just needed to wipe down the Roborock and replace the filter, roller and sweeper - all of which are items you replace every few months anyhow. Once this was done, Robbie the Roborock was happy to skitter across the floor to its feeding station.

Until it came time to get back to work. It backed out of its feeding spot, tweedled and announced that it's laser turret was inoperable.

I kind of knew this machine had a LiDAR - Laser Direction And Ranging - unit, but the idea of a laser turret sounds like something out of a bad space opera. "Space Pirates ahead! Man the Laser Turrets!"

Well, it turns out that the circular thing on the top of the robot is a laser turret. It spins around and that's how the Roborock figures out what it heading towards.

Unless the robot has eaten a hair-ball and jammed the turret so it won't spin.

I found instructions on disassembling the robot to kick-start the motor that turns the laser turret, but decided to be lazy first (to be fair, it was past my bed-time when the robot decided to not clean house, and I was tired. )

The laser turret has slots about the size of a pencil, so I stuck a pencil into the slot eraser-end first, and spun the turret a few times to break the detritus loose.

Presto, Robby is once again contentedly cleaning.