Named the Dyson 360
Eye, this robotic vacuum cleaner doesn't simply roam your house on its
own, cleaning your floors and climbing over obstacles, it also moves
using a completely new type of navigation technology that prevents it
from going over the same spot twice and running down the battery.
"Where contemporary robot vacuum cleaners use everything from random motion to laser range finders and ultrasound to navigate, the Dyson builds a floor plan with its camera, knows where it is and where it hasn’t been and uses infrared for collision avoidance,” says Stuart Kennedy for The Australian.
Thanks to its 360-degree camera that can see around the room at a 45-degree angle, the vacuum cleaner can record 30 pictures of its surroundings every second to create an instant map.
“We navigate by coming out of the charging station and then looking back at the charging station,” inventor James Dyson told Kennedy. “In that process it’s already got a picture of the room and knows where the charging station is in the room. It then cleans an area in a square spiral of 3 metres by 3 metres, then moves on to do another area 3 metres by 3 metres. It may come across a TV or something else in the way but it just goes round it and deals with it.”
The vacuum is also connected to a smartphone app, so you can set up cleaning schedules for it to start remotely when you’re not at home.
According to Margaret Rhodes at Wired, Dyson released a vacuum cleaner model called the Dyson DC06 in 2001, before swiftly taking if off the market. The novel vacuum cleaner had 84 sensors, ran with three computers and had a price tag of several thousand dollars, which of course was too much, and the machinery was too heavy to ever be a hit with customers.
In the years that followed, Dyson looked into how they could improve on this idea. Dyson himself invested more than $8 million in a robotics lab at Imperial College London, says Rhodes, with a particular interest in vision-powered systems. With the help of their research, the Dyson 360 Eye was created and will be released worldwide early next year.
Watch how it works below
"Where contemporary robot vacuum cleaners use everything from random motion to laser range finders and ultrasound to navigate, the Dyson builds a floor plan with its camera, knows where it is and where it hasn’t been and uses infrared for collision avoidance,” says Stuart Kennedy for The Australian.
Thanks to its 360-degree camera that can see around the room at a 45-degree angle, the vacuum cleaner can record 30 pictures of its surroundings every second to create an instant map.
“We navigate by coming out of the charging station and then looking back at the charging station,” inventor James Dyson told Kennedy. “In that process it’s already got a picture of the room and knows where the charging station is in the room. It then cleans an area in a square spiral of 3 metres by 3 metres, then moves on to do another area 3 metres by 3 metres. It may come across a TV or something else in the way but it just goes round it and deals with it.”
The vacuum is also connected to a smartphone app, so you can set up cleaning schedules for it to start remotely when you’re not at home.
According to Margaret Rhodes at Wired, Dyson released a vacuum cleaner model called the Dyson DC06 in 2001, before swiftly taking if off the market. The novel vacuum cleaner had 84 sensors, ran with three computers and had a price tag of several thousand dollars, which of course was too much, and the machinery was too heavy to ever be a hit with customers.
In the years that followed, Dyson looked into how they could improve on this idea. Dyson himself invested more than $8 million in a robotics lab at Imperial College London, says Rhodes, with a particular interest in vision-powered systems. With the help of their research, the Dyson 360 Eye was created and will be released worldwide early next year.
Watch how it works below
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