Until Thursday’s announcement, the 360 Eye’s prototype was hidden, even from Dyson employees, under a black sheet in a display room in Chicago. And Dyson still is keeping the device’s price point under wraps, though its top-of-the-line competitor, the iRobot Roomba 880, retails for $699.99. Ultimately, though the 360 Eye’s real limiting factor is the price tag, which runs $999 in the U.S. (and an even steeper $1,299 in my home country of Canada). That’s a lot of cash, and $100 more than the top of the line offering from iRobot’s Roomba lineup. Other than on the iRobot i7+, you’ll need to empty the bin of your robot regularly – they’re always small.
Just a few years ago, a sub-£200 robot would have been guaranteed to be useless but the Eufy is far from that. It doesn’t use any map-related cleverness to avoid pitfalls, but it does come with a long length of bendy plastic that you can use to physically block off problematic parts of your home. Do a bit of minor obstacle-removing prep, however, and you should find you don’t even need that. It’s not the most elegant of movers – in fact it’s rather haphazard, and quite forceful – but it does seem to cover the ground well if you leave it to get on with things. It also features automatic floor-type recognition which is rare at this price. Robot vacuums offer the same suction power as many upright vacuums, while the batteries can outlast those found on cordless vacuums, meaning robovacs are among the best vacuum cleaners you can buy right now.
It’s harder to combine those two networks into one larger network that detects red cars than it would be if you were using a symbolic reasoning system based on structured rules with logical relationships. “Lots of people are working on this, but I haven’t seen a real success that drives abstract reasoning of this kind.” There’s a wide range of robot vacuums on the market – with floor cleaning brands such as Dyson and Shark offering several models, alongside those that specialize in robot vacuums including Roomba and Neato. The device comes with seven cleaning heads for sucking up dust and dirt on hardwood floors, carpets and smaller areas like crevices. It makes night vacuuming a thing — the darker it is, the more visible the laser.
It will take visual cues from the camera to create a map of the cleaning area. This map is then stored in memory as a roadmap guide for where it needs to clean. The irobot vacuum cleaner 360 Eye also allows you to use Alexa commands to start cleaning, get status reports, and you can even find out more details about the features of the vacuum.
The smaller diameter and brush location allows it to work in corners and close to the walls. The downsides I know of are software (it is nicely done, but virtual mapping and learning of spaces is not 100% precise), connectivity . Other topic is a smaller dust bin, and it’s manageable if you clean it two times a week. More advanced robot vacuums have lasers on the front of the machine and some on the underside of the machine too.
Finally, there’s a No Climb option, which prevents the robot from trying to lift up over obstacles, such as furniture that has support bars. For me, the latter feature proved useful for a coffee table that has an X-shaped set of legs that run across the floor. Released back in 2016, the Dyson 360 Eye has remained one of the most powerful robot vacuum cleaners to date, easily beating much of its new competition.
However, everything else about this robot vacuum cleaner is top drawer, from the logical way it maps a room to the efficient way it cleans. Now all Roborock needs to do is follow iRobot’s lead and create a model with a self-emptying bin. Although even without one, the S6 MaxV is our champion droid, having been declared Best Robot Vacuum Cleaner at the T3 Awards 2021.