Dyson’s 360 Eye Robot Vacuum Is Coming To The US (And It’s So Cool!)

OK, it might not be a robot butler, but Dyson’s 360 Eye robot vacuum is probably about as close to a robot butler as one can currently get. That alone makes the product pretty cool.

But what’s even cooler is that the Dyson 360 Eye robot vacuum, which uses a “sophisticated” 360-degree vision system in conjunction with a spherical camera mounted on the top of the unit that allows it to “see” a room better than most of its competitors, just launched in Canada, and a U.S. release is soon to follow, according to TechCrunch.

“Vision is absolutely critical, but it was a completely new technology [when development began],” Dyson’s head robotics engineer, Mike Aldred, told TechCrunch of the product’s development. “We had to actually increase the capabilities of our team. We had a lot of software engineers, but we had to go into robotics algorithm engineers. We had to go into systems engineers. And once we started building the group, we realized it’s all about testing. It’s all about getting the product into the home and finding out exactly how the product’s going to work in and around many, many homes.”

Dyson’s 360 Eye robot vacuum has been in development for about 18 years now. Beta trials began in Japan, with 50 units in homes, which was then slowly and gradually expanded on. All in all, Aldred told TechCrunch that he estimated Dyson engineers spent between 100,000 and 200,000 hours testing the product before they felt comfortable making it widely available to consumers.

“The key was to get it in as many homes as possible, because if you only expose it to a small set of homes, even over a long course of time, basically, it will only work well in that small set of homes,” Aldred told TechCrunch. “So, the team’s entire goal was to go for a wide cross-section, too, in order to quickly identify mistakes in varied surroundings, correct for those and then get it back out as soon as possible to continue testing with the fixes.”

But before you go getting all excited about this very cool new product, keep in mind that the Dyson 360 Eye robot vacuum is currently retailing in Canada for about $1,300.