When you have an enclosed yard, sometimes it can be pretty tempting to just let your dog run around and do his business out there instead of taking a longer walk. The consequences come later, when you ruin a shoe after forgetting where your pup went.

Unfortunately, no one has been able to train a dog to pick up after itself, at least as far as I know.

But here’s the good news: there’s now a robot designed specifically for this crappy task. It’s called Beetl, and it’s an autonomous robot that moves around a yard like an outdoor Roomba picking up poop.

How The ‘Beetl’ Works

Basically, The Beetl is a computer vision-enabled robot that uses a front camera and real-time image analysis to locate any poop in your yard. The advanced sensor and vision technology allows the little guy to scan the area and find what it’s after without running into anything.

Once the robot locates poop within the scanned area, it moves directly over the waste and picks it up using a mechanical claw. Then, the poop is stored inside of a sealed container in the robot for later disposal.

As for cleaning that mechanism, the methods are not yet known. Hopefully it’s a simple process.

There’s also no need to worry about the robot getting stir-crazy and wandering away from your yard.

Settings allow you to create boundaries around your lawn. Once those boundaries are set, the Beetl will only move around within those confines. It’s not going to go on a poop-finding mission throughout town if you don’t want it to!

The Beetl is also able to connect to a cloud network, so any updates or new functions can be downloaded to it. That’s right, the future of dog poop cleanup is online.

Ideally, according to the five-person design team behind the robot, it will serve both as a poop-scooper and as a lawnmower. The designers are hoping to add a shearing mechanism that can cut long blades of grass.

You can watch the little bot in action below.

When Is The ‘Beetl’ Available?

Beetl is still in development, but if it works just as it’s supposed to it could be huge for millions of dog families. Maybe even cities can employ Beetl robots to diffuse neighborhood arguments about whose dog left a mess where.

There’s no definitive timeline for when it will be available to the public.

Let’s just hope this robot is available soon so I don’t have to take my dog on any more long walks during thunderstorms!

H/T: Awesome Inventions
FEATURED IMAGE: @Technabob/Twitter