Dyson launches 360 Vis Nav and V15s Detect Submarine

May 31, 2023

Toh Ee Ming

Dyson is firmly of the view that we need to do less of this cleaning nonsense. "Our future vision is of a home that can look after itself," says Dyson's chief technology officer John Churchill. "Our engineers continue to employ technologies to reduce the cognitive burden on our owners, saving time, energy, and effort … a true set-and-forget mindset." Perhaps this is bad time to mention that according to a recent study in Neurology, completing household chores may actually lower the risk of dementia?

Churchill is holding court at Dyson's global headquarters, St James Power Station, in Singapore, during a splashy three-day press trip in April. The company has flown dozens of journalists from all over the world to attend tours of the HQ's various facilities. The main reason for all this is hubbub, which Dyson is modestly branding "the future of clean," is the launch of not one, but three additions to its product lines.

Hot off the hot mess that was the Zone air-purifying headphones, and some excellent new hair straighteners, Dyson is unveiling its first wet vacuum, a completely redesigned robot cleaner, and an air purifier intended for large open-plan spaces (fortunately, this one you don't have to plonk on your head). Here's the breakdown.

Dyson's latest foray into robotic vacuum cleaners (the brand has made two attempts at robot hoovers and stopped selling them in the UK a year ago) is the 360 Vis Nav, coming later this year. Dyson claims this model circumvents the issues of low suction, a tendency to get stuck in awkward places, and generally not doing a proper job. We hope this is true, because right now Dyson is conspicuously absent from our best robot vacuums guide.

As its name suggests, the Vis Nav has a 360-degree vision system using a fisheye lens, which supposedly allows the robot to have a panoramic view of the home and accurately interpret its surroundings. A Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) system processes the information from the camera so the robot remembers where it has been and knows where to clean. Features very similar to these were in the 360 Heurist, Dyson's last robot cleaner, though.

Its motor, however, spins to 110,000 rpm (up from 78,000) to deliver a claimed six-fold bump in suction compared to any other robot vacuum, while a new "triple-action" brush bar (soft nylon for large debris on hard floors; anti-static carbon fiber filaments for fine dust; and stiff nylon bristles for carpet) hopefully makes light work of chores.

Jeremy White

WIRED Staff

Lauren Goode

Lauren Goode

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jeremy White

WIRED Staff

Lauren Goode

Lauren Goode

In early May, the company announced that it would be building a proprietary new technology battery plant in Singapore to manufacture these next-generation batteries. Described in the PR marketing bumf as "the most significant investment in advanced manufacturing in the firm's history," the new facility in Tuas—which spans the equivalent of 53 basketball courts—will supposedly be completed this year, and is expected to be fully operational by 2025.

The plant is part of a broader five-year £2.75 billion ($3.43 billion) investment plan from the brand, which also includes other new facilities in various countries as well as an initial recruitment of 250 robotics engineers in computer vision, machine learning, sensors, and mechatronics—then supposedly 700 more over the next five years.

Dyson says that its research teams have been working together globally on new battery tech that uses "novel materials and processes." But what does that actually mean? Dyson won't say. In a statement, founder James Dyson promises that "Dyson's next-generation battery technology will drive a major revolution in the performance and sustainability of [our] machines." Eight years on, however, it's still unclear what Dyson learned from its ill-fated 2015 acquisition of American startup Sakti3, a developer of solid-state lithium-ion batteries, in a deal worth a reported $90 million. This battery tech was clearly meant to be a key element in catapulting Dyson into becoming a serious challenger in the automotive industry. However, just three years later, the company said it had written off £46 million from acquiring the startup, after a sweeping review of its investment.

The year after that, in 2019, Dyson announced its decision to scrap its electric car project altogether, marking an unexpected twist of events for observers who had eagerly anticipated it taking on Tesla. The company had invested approximately £500 million into the project. The conclusion was that it was not commercially viable, and the investment required to bring the Dyson electric car to reality was more than had been budgeted.

WIRED asked Dyson whether Sakti3 solid-state learnings specifically are part of this promised next-gen battery tech. Again the company remains tight-lipped, perhaps wary after having revealed its automotive ambitions prematurely.

Yet, even if the promise of Sakti3 were exaggerated, James Dyson stated publicly that he created two competing battery teams in-house—Sakti3, plus another that was attempting a different approach to solid state. But very little is known right now about this internal Sakti3 competitor.

After its potentially calamitous and bizarre entry into personal audio with the Zone, the very public failure of its car concept, and the embarrassing abandonment of core Sakti3 patents, Dyson seems to still be searching for a way to expand its empire beyond its profitable "future of clean" and haircare niche.

After all, when Musk isn't making space rockets and breaking Twitter, he's busy showing off the latest developments on the humanoid Tesla Bot. Revealing the next breakthrough battery tech would be a sure way for Dyson to get one over on Elon.