GoKawiilis a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
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I’m deeply conflicted about the Dyson Spot + Scrub Ai robot vacuum and mop. It’s the company’s best robotic floor cleaner to date, with excellent mopping performance, good navigation and obstacle detection, and a multifunction dock that takes much of the busywork off your hands. But Dyson’s first attempt at a vacuum-and-mop combo is a worse vacuum than its predecessors, and that’s because there’s no Dyson motor in this vacuum.
You read that right. For $1,200, the Spot + Scrub doesn’t get you a Dyson vacuum; instead, you’re getting a third-party motor and brush system. “It’s not one of our V10 motors, it’s one of our partner technologies,” Nathan Lawson McLean, senior design manager at Dyson, told me.
Overall, the robot “merges new and already existing Dyson technologies with other platforms.” Lawson McLean confirmed that the Dyson tech is mostly found in the cyclonic auto-empty dock, the Dyson-designed roller mop system, and the Dyson-developed AI-powered stain-detection feature that gives the device its name. Hence, my conflict: how do I review a Dyson robot vacuum whose vacuum isn’t a Dyson?
The Dyson Spot + Scrub is a robot vacuum that can also mop your floors. It uses a large, self-cleaning roller mop that dispenses 140-degree-fahrenheit heated water as it runs, and sensors tell it to raise the mop while vacuuming carpet. Its vacuum has a claimed 18,000Pa of suction and uses a single rubber/bristle roller brush along with two spider-like side sweepers to capture dirt. There’s a camera on board for AI-powered obstacle detection and stain spotting, along with lidar for navigation.
It comes with Dyson’s first multifunction dock that, in addition to charging the bot, empties its onboard dustbin, cleans its mop, and drains and refills its water tanks. The giant dock is an eyesore, but it works and is a welcome upgrade. The lack of a self-empty feature on Dyson’s last robot vac, the 360 Vis Nav, was a big miss.
Dyson has ditched the D-shape of the Vis Nav and opted for a more standard round look. It has also abandoned its purely camera-based navigation in favor of lidar paired with camera-based AI obstacle recognition. iRobot made the same pivots last year when it began working with a third-party manufacturer to catch up with rapidly evolving competition — a few months before it filed for bankruptcy.
While Dyson isn’t likely to follow Roomba’s financial path, its latest model is clearly an attempt to keep up with the plethora of Chinese manufacturers in this space. The Spot + Scrub has a few signature Dyson features, but it is much more like the competition from Roborock or Ecovacs than any of Dyson’s previous bots. Right down to its motor.
Dyson wouldn’t share which “partner” (original design manufacturer, or ODM) it worked with, but mounting evidence suggests that Dyson built its flagship robot on the bones of Chinese ODM Shenzhen Picea Robotics’ R2 ODM platform. The product shares a lot of DNA with robots that we know were manufactured with Picea. It’s similar under the hood to Anker’s Eufy Omni line and iRobot’s 705 Combo Max, with the wheels, side brushes, and mop all bearing a strong resemblance (see picture).
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