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Why Dyson's robot vacuum took 16 years, and why it's headed to Japan first
- ChuckMcM 12y agoI appreciate the extra detail here. Having built small robotics platforms for more than a couple of decades I completely agree with much of what Dyson is saying, things really have changed tremendously in the last 5 years. Between $0.75 32 bit MCUs with 64K of flash and 8K of ram, to $3.00 6DOF IMU chips, to $5 HD video cameras, the ability to put high resolution sensors, better compute, and getting more watts per gram than ever before, it is a great time to take another look at what mobile robotics can and cannot do. I should have known, robots have always been held back by the weight of power and compute.
- Schwolop 12y agoInterestingly enough, for robotic vacuums _low_ weight is also a problem: the better your suction, the worse your ability to drive! The tank-tread wheels on Dyson's model are meant to help mitigate against this, but I gather from (now ex-) insiders that this is still a buggy sticking point (ha!) that needs to be solved before release.
- tgflynn 12y agoWouldn't high suction give you better traction (ie. by adding an additional downward force to the force of gravity) and hence mitigate any disadvantage of low weight ? Also with sufficiently well-controlled motors you should be able to optimize suction and drive, say to minimize power consumption or maximize speed/vacuum power.
- kordless 12y agoOr better, modulate the suction based on your desire to adjust course. Suck more on the left, less on the right, and heave on the rudder for a hairpin. :)
- jonnydark 12y agoIt'd give somewhat better traction but at the same time you increase the likelihood of stalling your motors. How does the machine know if the motors are stalling because there's something jammed in the wheels or because the vacuum is sucking stuck to the floor? You can design algorithms or sensor mechanisms to try and determine this and also tune the motors but now you have even more problems!
- arethuza 12y ago"Wouldn't high suction give you better traction" Reminds me of the F1 Brabham BT46B "fan car" that sucked itself down to the road using a large engine driven fan at the back of the car: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brabham_BT46#Brabham_BT46B.C2.A0.E2.80.93_the_.22fan_car.22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brabham_BT46#Brabham_BT46B.C2.A...
- IshKebab 12y agoThe tank treads are sprung, so I think it actually just sucks the sole plate onto the ground rather than the tracks.
- darkmighty 12y agoI'm not sure the ability to drive is that much worse -- for constant curvature surfaces it should just increase traction. I guess the suction could be regulated if a certain varying inclide causes trouble.
- kordless 12y ago> varying inclide them bumps
- tonylemesmer 12y agoex-dyson robotic engineer here. Correct - low weight means you have less force to apply to the wheels and hence achieve grip. The design of the aperture where the air goes into the vaccum (the soleplate) has to be optimised between flicking the carpet fibres in the right fashion to achieve good dirt pickup and not impeding sliding across the carpet too much. The design of the tyres is critical. If there is any slip in the tyres you have a problem. Even though the attitude and trajectory of the robot is governed by the information coming from the camera it does also rely on feedback from the wheel speed sensors. If you have slip on one side and not the other then you will tend to spin around and not drive in a straight line. Adding more power to the slipping wheel merely exacerbates the problem. You'll notice the treads on the tank tracks are chunky. This is to give maximum grip on thicker pile carpets, however this kind of carpet tend to be "squishy" and allow the wheels to float somewhat on the carpet surface no matter what design of tyre. So this is probably where they are having problems. Also you'll notice the wheels are not rigidly mounted to the robot chassis, they have suspension. But unlike car suspension the bottom of the robot does take some of the weight and it touches the floor. If you have more mass in the robot it gives you more latitude to distribute it between the wheels and the soleplate. Its a careful balancing act and all of these variables have to be tuned based on the amount of suction your vacuum motor is providing.
- rbobby 12y agoAdd suction to the treads? A few air holes routed to the side of the tread where there's a vacuum pickup? I bet it would be tricky to get a seal that has low enough friction to allow the tread to slide past but still a good enough seal to get good suction from the bottom of the tread. Oh and it's got to last and last. Yikes... back to coding I go...
- imdsm 12y agoI have great ideas, which are actually terrible ideas, that's why I stick to coding.
- Shivetya 12y agocan you not get any propulsion from a beater bar?
- pw 12y agoThis was a disappointingly light read. I was hoping for lots of fascinating technical details and a heartening, Apple-esque story of biding one's time with a product (along with an analysis of what technical advancements make now the right time for the Dyson robot vacuum). And there was exactly one paragraph about why it's launching in Japan first.
- ianstallings 12y agoI actually have a hosts rule for techcrunch articles that helps me avoid this frustration: /etc/hosts: 0.0.0.0 techcrunch.com
- djrogers 12y agoexcept the linked article is on engadget...
- ianstallings 12y agoWell you could extrapolate......................................................................... It's all shit anyway, garbage.
- lingben 12y agoif you're interested in the product you'll get about 1000 times more information via their website than this article https://www.dyson360eye.com/ https://www.dyson360eye.com/
- deanclatworthy 12y agoEverything except pricing information and independent verification of their superiority claims. Dyson's have traditionally come with a premium for their "technology". I'll be patiently waiting for the reviews to trickle in.
- sparkman55 12y agoYikes, what did they do to the page's "scroll" function? Do people actually find that usable? It definitely made me think the page was broken at first... The slideshow seems like a 'play' (right-arrow) much more than a 'scroll' (down-arrow). Is this a metaphor for Dyson vacuums in general? (Technically-clever, shiny, but not necessarily the most effective)
- arjie 12y agoIt worked very well on my laptop. Moving between slides felt very natural. Going back, I see that scrolling 'back' (up) didn't work as well. Interesting. I would never have noticed if your comment didn't make me check. Why did you think it was broken? It said 'scroll to begin' on my screen so I suppose I knew I was expecting something when I scrolled.
- ekianjo 12y agoI find these round robots completely useless in Japan, because in most apartments, they are unable to move around because there's just too much stuff at ground level. There's a reason why normal vacuum cleaner ends are not shaped like landmine detectors, and unless you seriously address that point in your design, these robots will remain completely unadapted to most households.
- poglet 12y agoThis things are so popular right now in Japan. After going to the shops and seeing a demo of them, I'm also wondering how they work in a Japanese style apartment (most of which are tiny). My friend got one (forgot the brand) because she didn't have time to clean.
- ekianjo 12y agoI've seen them at work in Japan and they are far from being efficient because of the space constraints, and because there are usually carpets everywhere in Japan too so it makes the surface uneven. They are way too expensive too, yet they seem to sell pretty well. Sharp even has a funny model that say "Ouch!" ("Itai" in Japanese) every time it hits something. That's cute, but that shows how stupid these robots are.
- Cthulhu_ 12y agoTBH vacuuming the floor is just a small part of cleaning - hiring a cleaner is probably a better solution then. Cheaper in the short run, too.
- kisielk 12y agoYeah, but it's one I found I often neglected in the past. I ended up buying a Roomba since it was on sale and it's worked out quite well. It's not perfect at vacuuming but on average the floor is a lot cleaner when I can run the Roomba every couple of days while I go out for lunch versus me getting around to vacuuming every few weeks.
- hmottestad 12y ago
- yitchelle 12y agoThe title is almost click baiting. I was hoping to read an in-depth article for the 16years of effort in design the vacuum. Information on how the engineers solve massive problems that would have take many years to do. From the general sense of the article, 16 years was the elapse time from their first version to their release version. However, probably the right level of detail from engadget...
- stigi 12y agoI was expecting a good argument on why it's launched in JA prior to US, UK or EU. Just the fact that Japan is a big adaptor for robotics doesn't make it. Roomba and others have established solid markets for that kind of product outside of Japan already. I hope Dyson can match the demand and will start selling the 360 eye globally soon.
- toyg 12y agoI think the real motivation for a Japan-only launch is that, if things don't work out, they can quietly kill it without experiencing a costly PR fiasco in Western markets. Which is a bit weak for such a "revolutionary" products.
- ZenoArrow 12y agoI wonder if part of the decision on the Japan-first launch was due to the Japanese market being the first to show decent interest in the original Dyson vacuums.
- jamessb 12y agoThere's more discussion about the 360 eye in this (15 hours older) thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8267622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8267622
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- riffraff 12y agothere's one thing I don't understand about this robot, as well as the roomba: how does it clean corners?
- e1g 12y agoI don't know about the 360 eye, but the roomba has a little protruding spinner (http://bit.ly/1AdpUzs http://bit.ly/1AdpUzs) that allows it to move things into the sweeping area. Works reasonably well on corners - it doesn't get dust right in the very tight part of the corner, but neither would a regular rolling vacuum cleaner.
- tonylemesmer 12y agoIt doesn't. The idea of the cleaner is that it reduces the overall level of dirt in your house. Its a "maintenance" cleaner as it can just continuously clean. Therefore the buildup of dirt in the corners will be less as there is less dirt around generally. However you will still need a secondary vacuum to do the corners, cobwebs, stairs etc. Its aimed at people with plenty of cash, who might not blink at having one per floor of their house.
- hessenwolf 12y agoOur Roomba does a good job on the corners. It has a rotating brush that sticks out. We thought we'd need a second vacuum cleaner, but we really haven't.
- Magicstatic 12y agoI'm still impressed by the fact that Dyson made a fan with no...fans.
- facepalm 12y agoThey didn't. The fan is integrated in the base. Actually the fan example is exactly what makes me look at any Dyson announcements with a lot of skepticism.
- Stulander 12y agoThat and "digital motors".
- jonnydark 12y agoIt's a bladeless fan, not a fanless fan. It works using an impeller in the base and it feeds the air through a thin gap in an annulus shaped aerofoil. Strictly speaking you could argue that impellers have blades and all they've done is conceal them inside the base rather than remove them entirely. A truly bladeless fan would use something like an electrostatic fluid accelerator to accelerate particles with an electric field - but that's probably a little too sci-fi for a consumer electronics company!
- revjx 12y agoJonny, you're RUINING THE MAGIC Good to see other Dyson people on here.
- buro9 12y agoIs the solution to a small robot vacuum really to increase the power of the motor above the competition? On hard wood flooring I've never found rotary brushes to be better than side sweeps (what most of the competition uses). And on carpet where rotary brushes do perform better, I can't help but think that instead of upping the suction power you could approach the problem from a different perspective... such as using a low vibration to shake the dirt and dust free of the carpet so that it's easier to pick up the material with less suction power. I really like Dyson products, but it very much feels like they have a hammer (high powered suction in lower watt motors) and so every problem looks like a nail. Some of their innovations over the past 5 years haven't impressed me... Their hand dryers do a worse job than the classic World Dryer and look uglier over time and seem to be less performant over time (smaller clogged filters perhaps!?). Their "fanless" fan of course has a fan, and whilst it shifts a good chunk of air at first it also suffers from degrading performance as the hidden fan gets clogged with dust over a season. And yet, the classic desk fan performs consistently well all the time. And the problem with releasing highly-hyped products that turn out to be only average, is that it's hard to believe the hype in future. Whereas I used to look at a Dyson as being incredibly functional innovation, I now look upon them as gimmicky innovation using their single core-trick. And of course, they will successfully market and patent all of this (of which even the linked article is a part of that puzzle), such that people start to believe this is the best solution (not proven at all), and that Dyson will claim that no-one else can provide the best because of the patents (partly true, but who said this was the best?). Years of buying and using Dyson products has left me greatly cynical. Their upright hoovers are still the business though.
- ZenoArrow 12y ago"Their hand dryers do a worse job than the classic World Dryer and look uglier over time and seem to be less performant over time (smaller clogged filters perhaps!?)." Really? That's the exact opposite experience than I've had, the Airblade dries my hands faster and more thoroughly than any traditional hand dryer.
- buro9 12y agoWhich one? The Airblade db works, but not as efficiently as rubbing hands together under a World Dryer (not one of the cheaper imitators of them). The Airblade V works extremely well, but tends to suffer from being put where old driers were, which is too damn high to be used comfortably... in motorway services where these and old traditional ones are offered you see people choose the older ones. The tap based one I've not seen in the world.
- buro9 12y agoIs the solution to a small robot vacuum really to increase the power of the motor above the competition? On hard wood flooring I've never found rotary brushes to be better than side sweeps (what most of the competition uses). And on carpet where rotary brushes do perform better, I can't help but think that instead of upping the suction power you could approach the problem from a different perspective... such as using a low vibration to shake the dirt and dust free of the carpet so that it's easier to pick up the material with less suction power. I really like Dyson products, but it very much feels like they have a hammer (high powered suction in lower watt motors) and so every problem looks like a nail. Some of their innovations over the past 5 years haven't impressed me... Their hand dryers do a worse job than the classic World Dryer and look uglier over time and seem to be less performant over time (smaller clogged filters perhaps!?). Their "fanless" fan of course has a fan, and whilst it shifts a good chunk of air at first it also suffers from degrading performance as the hidden fan gets clogged with dust over a season. And yet, the classic desk fan performs consistently well all the time. And the problem with releasing highly-hyped products that turn out to be only average, is that it's hard to believe the hype in future. Whereas I used to look at a Dyson as being incredibly functional innovation, I now look upon them as gimmicky innovation using their single core-trick. And of course, they will successfully market and patent all of this (of which even the linked article is a part of that puzzle), such that people start to believe this is the best solution (not proven at all), and that Dyson will claim that no-one else can provide the best because of the patents (partly true, but who said this was the best?). Years of buying and using Dyson products has left me greatly cynical. Their upright hoovers are still the business though.
- abcd_f 12y ago> Why Dyson's robot vacuum took 16 years Because that's how Dyson marketing department spins it.
- Eiriksmal 12y agoThis is a valid point. What better way to convince people that your product is superior to the competition? "Why are we so late to the robot-vacuum game? Great question. You see, we spent 16 years perfecting our robot, whereas our competitors rushed something to launch to capitalize on a trend."
- christop 12y agoIt does look very impressive and I'm sure it picks up more dust and dirt than the Roomba, but my Roomba neatly fits under every piece of furniture I have. The extra height of the Dyson means it wont make it under our sofa, the TV stand, into the gap between the kitchen floor and the cupboards (well, perhaps Roomba doesn't fit there either, but the side brush does), under the chest of drawers in the bedroom etc etc.. I'll have to wait for the next iteration (and hope I'm rich by then).