There were only some areas around the chairs and table which were left unvacuumed. During this time the robot seemed to run at maximum power most of the time, and with a high pitch (we measured the volume at 65dBA, a bit louder than a regular conversation). The noise softens when it goes over areas that have already been cleaned.
As someone with more cats than common sense, it’s great to see a powerful robot vacuum enter the market. I was and still am happy with Xiaomi’s robot vacuum and Ecovacs’ specialized robot vacuum / mop combo but since the fur babies keep on shedding, our family needs to keep on upgrading. They self-navigate on any flooring type, from hardwoods to carpets, and some models can even be programmed to have a cleaning schedule and to sync to smartphones and smart home devices. For example, iRobot’s latest Roomba vacuums are activated by a mobile app or smart home sensor to start cleaning when you leave your home.
Dyson is promising up to 50 minutes of cleaning time before the 360 Vis Nav navigates back to its dock for a recharge, after which it will resume cleaning exactly where it left off. It can be monitored and scheduled using Dyson’s app, while sensors in the robovac will also help create dust maps of your home so you can pinpoint the source of where your dirt is coming from and proactively deal with it to reduce the amount of cleaning you need to do. When we reviewed the Dyson 360 Eye, we were impressed at how well it actually sucked up dirt, easily outperforming the competition at the time, but were also frustrated at the fact that its camera struggled to navigate a room when it got dark.
Robot vacuums typically have rotating corner brushes under them to sweep up dust and debris from corners and along walls. The 360 Vis Nav instead has a small, red ‘side edge actuator’ which pops out of the unit when it goes along a wall’s edge, redirecting suction to the side. Ultimately, cleaning the floor took 28 minutes of actual cleaning time, but 3 hours and 32 minutes if you include all the battery charging.
Perhaps you were today years old when you learned that a shark cordless ever existed in the first place. There was the Dyson 360 Eye, a cumbersome relic that’s been collecting dust in a figurative basement since 2016, and the Dyson 360 Heurist, a 2020 upgrade to the Eye that was never even released in the U.S. This story was originally published on British GQ with the headline, “Dyson’s 360 Vis Nav is an all-seeing, all-sucking robot vacuum that’ll rule over your home”. As of yet, there’s no release date set for the Dyson Big+Quiet, but both the 360 Vis Nav robot vacuum and V15s Detect Submarine are due out later this year. So they should sneak into our lives just ahead of the AI apocalypse after all.
Our hard floor test involves scattering sand around an L-shaped vinyl surface to see how well the robot picks up dirt on the floor and around walls and corners. For instance, the lens doesn’t double as a home security camera (like some other brands’ vacs), but this could be preferable for some, considering recent privacy concerns regarding how such sensitive data is used and kept by robot vacuum manufacturers. Three years is a long time in consumer tech and the Dyson 360 Vis Nav is evidently a big step up from the 360 Heurist.