To clean out the dustbin, you just have to press the latch located in front of the camera. From there, you simply pull it out and empty the dirt into the trash. This part is easy enough to remove, but putting it back on requires a bit of elbow grease. This isn’t a huge deal, but since Dyson recommends you wash the filters every month, it can get annoying. Also located behind the back grille is a USB port, but you likely won’t need to use it unless your robot is malfunctioning and have to manually upload a fix.
Then it comes back to base, ejects the dust and debris and cleans its own mop! Oh and just to really stick it to rival ‘bots, this genius of a machine is able to lift its mop safely out of the way when it detects it’s on a carpet or rug. Control of the 360 Heurist vacuum cleaner is through the Dyson Link app, which is true of all Dyson’s smart products, from its air purifiers to its Lightcycle task lamps. There’s a little more to using this vacuum cleaner than its predecessor, starting with a requirement to map an area before the robot can clean it. You can store maps of multiple floors, moving the 360 Heurist around your home to clean everywhere. My problem with the Roomba is that while it picks up dust, hair and other things, it often doesn’t do a thorough enough job of it.
The 360 Eye sticks with the bristles, with carbon fibers that are hardy but not too hard and also to counteract the static cling that keeps dust attached to things. They’re all enclosed on a plastic shell; the bristle bar is just as wide as the Dyson itself, but is enclosed in a plastic casing. This means all that cyclone suck can be transmitted across the entire bar. Each day, I reacted with a mix shark cordless of surprise and disgust at just how much it could pick up from my rugs and floors. Models with external rotating brushes often buffer away as much dust as it pulls in, but because the 360 Eye’s bristles and suction are both in the same place, dust bunnies don’t get the chance. This robot vac doubles as a mop, and thanks to its manual controls can get to work almost as soon as you open its box.
A brush bar that is the entire width of vacuum provides edge to edge cleaning and prevents the 360 Heurist from having to make large overlapping passes. Dyson’s new robot vacuum cleaner is called the Dyson 360 Eye for a reason. According to Dyson, it uses infrared sensors that “work in conjunction with a lens on the top of the machine that houses a 360° panoramic camera”. This unique 360° vision system dyson robot vacuum can build a more detailed floor plan because it can see all areas within the room and plan ahead. Which brings me nicely to why this vac is far and away the best robot vacuum cleaner for houses with rugs – thin slippery rugs, thick rugs, rugs with tasseled edges, you name it, this little cracker sails over them all. It does this because it’s equipped with caterpillar tank tracks instead of tiny wheels.
And while the camera is great for navigating around corners, it also means the 360 Eye doesn’t get up right against the wall when cleaning. So while my living room and kitchen were much cleaner overall, I did find a few rogue dust bunnies in tight corners and alcoves. Also, because it’s relatively tall, it wasn’t able to get under my TV stand and scraped along the bottom of my bed. I tested it at the same time as the Eufy RoboVac 11, which stands at 3 inches, and was able to reach under my bed and TV stand without a problem.