Up to 65 air watts of suction power, plus a way to clean corners and edges could make the Dyson 360 Vis Nav the ultimate robot vacuum cleaner.
For the last few years in the merry month of May, Dyson has launched a new vacuum cleaner. And, right on schedule, there’s another one… just not another cordless vacuum cleaner like last year’s Dyson Gen5 Detect.
This year, Dyson’s got a new robot vacuum cleaner instead which, the company promises, will outperform its competition. Called the Dyson 360 Vis Nav, it’s apparently been seven years in the making. So, where did all that time and effort get put in?
As with all things Dyson, it got sucked up (pun very much intended) into making what looks far removed from the usual round robot vacuum cleaners we’re used to seeing.
Instead, the Dyson 360 Vis Nav is a D-shaped droid. According to the company, the two sharp angles on the front allow the robovac to get into corners. And if it happens to miss one, Dyson promises it will backtrack.
More importantly, Dyson engineers have figured out that a tiny little tube-like protrusion sticking out from one side is all that’s needed to make sure the bot picks up dust and debris from the edges of a room too – the lack of edge cleaning has been one of our biggest gripes with most robot vacuum cleaners we’ve tested. This protrusion is soft enough (like silicone) to not damage walls and skirting boards.
Design-wise, the blue D-shaped bot looks chunky and yet there’s a distinct Dyson aesthetic to it, probably because of the recognizable Radial Cyclone tech on the top plate of the robovac. As with the Dyson cordless vacuum cleaners, this separates the larger particles from the smaller and they all get sealed into what Dyson promises to be the most airtight system of any robot vacuum.
Allowing you to get a better idea of what the robovac is sucking up is a piezo sensor that was first introduced to Dyson’s cordless handsticks in the V15 Detect. While you won’t see a graphical representation of the particles being cleaned on the touchscreen on the top plate, it helps create a dust map of your home which is accessible via the MyDyson smartphone app.
Helping the 360 Vis Nav navigate around a home is a combination of a fish-eye lens capable of ‘seeing’ a full 360º and 26 additional sensors. These sensors have different purposes, including obstacle avoidance, dust detection, edge detection and calculating time of flight (ToF) to help with navigation and map creation. There’s no lidar here as with some other robot vacuum cleaners.
