Dyson's Latest Robot Vacuum Launches in the US on March 19, And It's Not Cheap (2024)

Dyson’s highly anticipated robot vacuum, the 360 Vis Nav, has an official US release date: The high-powered, automatic cleaner is slated to go on sale March 19 for $1,199.

It features 65 air watts of suction power, which Dyson claims is two times the power of any competitor. It also offers whole-machine HEPA filtration, a panoramic 360 camera, a Hyperdymium motor that spins at 135,000rpm, a side air duct for edge and corner cleaning, and a Piezo sensor to detect dirt as it works.

The company is known for its powerful and expensive cordless and upright vacuums, so this latest robot model holds a lot of promise. The 360 Vis Nav will be the first robot vacuum that Dyson has released in the US in over half a decade. The last one it launched, the Dyson 360 Eye, was in 2016. A follow-up, the 360 Heurist, debuted in 2020 but never came to the US.

The 360 Vis Nav first launched in Australia in early 2023, so most details about the robot itself are known, but Dyson has issued a few software updates since then, and an upcoming rollout will allow it to use the dirt data collected with its piezo sensor to rank rooms in terms of dirt level and prioritize cleaning accordingly.

360 Vis Nav Features

The 360 Vis Nav isn’t a hybrid robot mop and vacuum. It doesn’t even have a self-emptying base station. As far as hardware features, Dyson elected to keep the Vis Nav focused on cleaning capability.

Dyson will use the 360 camera to navigate your home while avoiding obstacles, but promises captured images never leave the robot. It uses distance sensors and optical flow sensors to create a map as it works.

(Credit: Dyson)

It will use this navigation tech to prioritize the middle of the room first. Its brushroll combines different materials from the swappable vacuum heads on its popular stick vacuum lines: a soft “fluffy” nylon grabs debris from hard floors, anti-static carbon fiber filaments collect dust, and stiff nylon bristles dig into carpet.

After sweeping the middle, the vacuum will turn to the edges with a side air duct instead of the usual spinning side brush. The air duct reaches walls and corners and extends the vacuum’s suction instead of sweeping dirt toward a central brush roll. The robot uses the piezo sensor to gauge what it’s picking up as it works and create a kind of “heat map” of dirt on the Dyson app, the company says.

The 360 Vis Nav will have four cleaning modes: auto, quiet, boost, and quick which prioritizes the middle of the floors instead of edges to get the job done rapidly. The dust bin has a large 0.5-liter capacity and emptying it looks similar to the process for its cordless vacuums. An eject button drives dirt out and into your trash.

Outlook Uncertain

Given the large dustbin, you shouldn’t have to empty it after every run. Dyson wanted a minimal base station that doesn't require you to buy replacement dust bags, so the company avoided a self-emptying feature. With self-emptying now a fairly common feature for robot vacuums these days, I’ll be curious just how inconvenient it feels to have to go back to emptying the dust bin manually on a premium vacuum.

(Credit: Dyson)

While most competitors list their robots' suction power in Pascals (Pa), Dyson is using the less common metric of air watts. A Dyson rep claimed that air watts are a better measure of actual suction instead of just pressure, but it also makes it harder to compare Dyson’s suction at face value. We plan to put the Dyson 360 Vis Nav through our extensive pickup performance tests as soon as possible to find out just how well this high-power suction works in the real-world.

As is typical for the brand, the 360 Vis Nav is expensive. For comparison, the iRobot Roomba j9+ is a premium robot vacuum without mopping capabilities but with a self-emptying base station, and it costs $899.99. Stay tuned for our full Dyson 360 Vis Nav review and check out our other favorite robot vacuums in the meantime.