Dyson says the 26 sensors ensure obstacle avoidance, so that’s a promise it won’t get stuck up sofas or behind pot plants, then. We’ll see. Perhaps the new form factor will help, as this version is thinner than the last two, being just 99 mm tall (the Heurist was 120 mm).
The 360 Vis Nav can pinpoint its position to within 71 mm, so that certainly allows room for error. The accompanying app lets you pre-map dust hotspots, automatically increasing suction power when needed. It’s pet-friendly, too, with HEPA filtration and a quiet mode.
Dyson seems particularly pleased with the 360 Vis Nav’s edge cleaning (another feature the old models boasted), saying that now its sensors detect the sides of a room and then redirect suction through a new side-actuator instead of using sweepers to flick dirt away.
Dyson V15s Detect Submarine
Photograph: Dyson
For the first time, Dyson has an all-in-one wet-and-dry cordless vacuum cleaner, the V15s Detect Submarine, which like the new robot vac will be launched later this year. It supposedly delivers just the right amount of water to remove spills, stains, as well as small dry debris like food crumbs. It does so through eight water jets that release 18 ml of water every minute to a motor-driven microfiber roller, which Dyson judges as the right amount to wash floors evenly without leaving “excessive wetness.”
The 300-ml water tank is apparently good for up to 110 square meters of flooring. A plate extracts the contaminated water from the wet roller and dumps it into a separate, larger, 360-ml waste tank so no dirt or debris is transferred back onto your floor.
An “acoustic dust sensing” feature includes an LCD screen showing the size and number of particles being sucked up, and measures microscopic particles with a piezo sensor, so the vacuum can automatically increase suction from the 125,000-rpm motor when needed.
Dyson Purifier Big+Quiet Formaldehyde
Pimping its existing HEPA Cool Formaldehyde fan that can filter pollen, skin shed by pets, tobacco smoke, household cleaning products, and outdoor air pollutants such as formaldehyde, Dyson now has a “Big+Quiet” version of this air purifier. Rather than aimed at your average bedroom, the Big+Quiet Formaldehyde has been specifically engineered to clean air in large, open-plan spaces.
The fan system can deliver purified air over 10 meters, Dyson claims, while a new carbon dioxide sensor supposedly lets you know when to ventilate. That’s the “big”—the “quiet” is covered by the fact that this HEPA fan operates at just 56 decibels.
Want to bring the outside in? A breeze mode apparently mimics air-flow patterns and characteristics of a natural outdoor airflow.
What About the Next-Gen Batteries?
Eager to flex its engineering muscle, Dyson’s jaunt around its Singapore sites brought journalists on a behind-the-scenes look at its St James Power Station, the Singapore Advanced Manufacturing facility (to see the makings of its digital motors), and the Singapore Technology Centre.
Various staff members demonstrated research products, including autonomous robots with grasping arms that can help pick up household objects, while dishing out miniature models of vacuum cleaners as mementos for the journalists, constructed using the prototyping lab’s bank of industrial 3D printers.
What wasn’t on display, however, was something potentially far more lucrative to the company than iterative updates to vacuums and purifiers: how Dyson was planning to manufacture what it promised will be radically new types of batteries.
