Robotic vacuums tend to do a little more than simply sweep things up and suck things off the floor like a regular vacuum could. In the past couple of years, they’ve added mopping capabilities, expanding what sort of cleaning job these robotic appliances can do.
We’ve seen it from a lot of players, including Roborock and Narwal, and from Ecovacs and Mova and Dreame and Samsung so on.
But while these evolutions have been consistently from specific brands known for robotic vacuums, the one we’ve been surprised to see mopping missed out on is Dyson, one of the leaders in conventional hand-held vacuums.
That apparently changes this year, as Dyson updates its robot to become both a vacuum and mop, resulting in the Dyson Spot+Scrub AI.
The new model is a bit of a reinvention, keeping the classic purple and red accents Dyson is known for and blending it with a black vac, but adding to the vacuum beyond the colours.
The system uses the green light from the V15 stick vacuum to pick up on dust, while its camera responds to the light and uses AI to adjust its cleaning behaviour accordingly, picking up on both dust and strains, and cleaning both until both are gone.
Depth sensing is also a part of the package, using LiDAR to map the home, and providing an understanding of anything that gets in the way. Both camera and LiDAR work with the AI, and can apparently recognise nearly 200 types of objects to make decisions about where it should go, building a map for each session and photographing where objects were when it needed to change path.
As it’s cleaning, the Dyson Spot+Scrub AI cleans its wet roller using heated water on every rotation, mopping to the edge while its vacuum sucks up gunk.
The pièce de résistance may end up being in the dock, with Dyson going the opposite way from most robotic vacuum cleaners: instead of using bags and requiring that consumable, Dyson has kept with the bag-less design, and uses a dock you can empty yourself.
To date, the only other recent robotic vacuum to try this has been from Ecovacs. That means where Dyson is going, you don’t need bags. You simply empty to the vacuum chamber when it’s full, with up to roughly 100 days worth of capacity.
You’ll also need to empty the spent water rank, while refilling the clean water tank, but that’s the norm for most robotic vacuums and mops that aren’t plugged directly into the wall.
“Dyson engineers have been developing robotic cleaners since the 1990s. We revealed the first DC06 in 2001 and have continued to develop vision technology since then,” said James Dyson, Founder of Dyson.
“Now we have engineered a robot that intelligently detects, identifies, and cleans stains, spills and debris, identifying stubborn stains and going over and over them until they are gone, using advanced AI,” he said.
Perhaps most interesting is the pricing, which sees the Dyson Spot+Scrub AI fairly competitive against the assortment of other high-end robotic vacuum and mop competitors. Most of these tend to come with price tags of over $1999, while Dyson’s Spot+Scrub AI is priced at $1999 locally.
No doubt, that’s sure to make an interesting dent on the market, and could even see competitors lower their prices to fight back.
We’ll be watching this one to see what happens, that’s for sure.
