Did a despondent Roomba vacuum commit robot suicide?

A despondent robot vacuum cleaner has died tragically after heaving itself onto a hot element, where it ended its cleaning days incinerated to a pile of ashes.

Okay, the robot was probably not depressed, nor animate, but an Austrian homeowner's story of how his house caught fire when he wasn't there was too bizarre for local media to overlook.

The 44-year-old man said he had turned on the vacuum to suck up a few grains of spilled cereal, left it on the counter — switched off — and then left the house with his family, according to the Daily Mail.

But while the residents were gone, so the personified story goes, the miserable vacuum cleaner turned itself on and rolled onto a nearby hot plate, where it lit a fire that evacuated the entire building.

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The owners say their possessions are badly smoke damaged and they intend to sue the company.

"I don't know about the allegations of a robot suicide but the homeowner is insistent that the device was switched off — it's a mystery how it came to be activated and ended up making its way to the hotplate," a firefighter on the scene told the Daily Mail.

We may all need to be a little more careful with our robotic devices, or at least give them holidays sometimes.