A robot cleaning vacuum was sabotaged in its efforts to tidy up when the family dog decided to do its business on the floor just as the device approached.

The owner, Mr Chen, said the pooch appears to have waited until he went out the door to relieve itself in front of the robot vacuum, perhaps expecting it to be swept up and hidden before the owner returned on September 3.

Mr Chen lives in an apartment in the Chinese city of Luoyang in Henan Province. He said the canine had just been for a walk and joked that it had wanted to play a trick on its robot cleaning pal.

The cleaner emerges from its docking station and has not gone even a metre when the dog runs in front of it, does its business on the floor, and then surrounds the vacuum with piles of dog mess the robot cannot avoid.

It scans left and right and then eventually decides to tackle the mess. The inevitable result is that much of it ends up being smeared over the floor, and the dog runs away as if realising that maybe it went too far this time.

The robot continues trying to clean up the mess but only seems to make it worse.

When Mr Chen returned, he said it was relatively quick to clean the floor, but it took more than two hours to take the robot apart and clean off the foul mess.