360 Vis Nav - An absolute navigational joke with one redeeming quality

I've had my Nav for about half a year now and have a few thoughts about this thing.

TL;DR Often comical mapping and navigation. Excellent suction and cleaning. Not a finished product by any means. I feel like an alpha tester or worse.

First, the mapping seems like pre-alpha software, seriously, Dyson just phoned it in on this. On the latest firmware, as of December 2024, it has gotten worse! Dyson claims that mapping speed has improved by up to 40% but probably failed to mention that it achieves this by being about 40% dumber when it attempts to map. Why should I care about how fast something is that might only be done just a few times in a product's entire lifespan? If anything, it should be a feature claim that mapping is now 40% SLOWER because it's 40% more thorough! You're working with fixed hardware here, and unless you have some breakthrough improvement in your algorithm, I'll take the trade off of slower but more careful mapping over something that just breezes over the details of your floor plan. Yikes! The Nav literally skipped over an entire bathroom and half of another room when mapping with the latest firmware. It never did this previously.

Second, when actually cleaning, the Vacuum will tend to just get "stuck" with absolutely no obstacles, no poor lighting conditions, or literally anything around it. I've found it countless times in the middle of a room like an absolute dork just sitting there saying it's stuck. Turns out the way it maps, based on the upward facing camera, means that it looks for unique points of visual contrast almost like an optical sensor on a computer mouse would track over a table. This part of the room has "bare" surfaces with very little nearby "contrast" that the robot could latch and triangulate onto. My guess is this new firmware tweaked the algorithm to pay closer attention to near detail as opposed to far detail, which is causing the issue. This is idiotic, both near and far detail need to be considered, even at the expense of robot speed. There is no "one home" as some people go for the modernist clean and generally low detail / clutter look and others do quite the opposite. In other words, the tracking needs to be adaptable, and it all starts with doing the initial mapping SLOWLY and carefully. As it currently stands, the vacuum may have to travel a great distance to "notice" a contrast between say a flat white low detail wall / floor / ceiling / and the multi-patterned details of a bookshelf. I will gladly take a robot that maps a room with a low tolerance to objects being moved or removed over a dumber but faster style of mapping that is more tolerant of the room's layout shifting. Which is to say I'm literally willing to compromise, however slightly, how I live my life so that a robot can clean my floors daily. And I think most customers feel that way too. If you're trying to make the robot more "adaptable" with this new firmware, you're totally not nailing it right now.

I've almost proven this mapping theory to myself by applying bright and contrasting stickers a few feet above the ground in the troubled area where it gets "stuck" and found that the Vacuum does a better job not getting stuck there anymore, despite tons of high frequency detail being visible to the naked eye just 5 to 10 feet beyond that troubled area. Add to this that I highly doubt the optical sensors under the Nav are particularly great at tracking speed and distance (if they do at all) on certain high frequency carpet types or other rugs that are shaggy and introduce secondary movement as the fibers rebound after compression. If Dyson is using wheel travel distance that further messes things up as the wheels spin out when the Nav tries to unsuccessfully mount the corners of my bookshelf speaker stands partially destroying the paint in the process. Brutal.

Dyson engineers if you're reading this and you feel that the hardware is tapped out and you're at the limits of its abilities, then SLOW the robot down to get more ACCURATE data. I'd assume most of us turn this thing on when we're not even home so taking that extra 30 minutes to do anything, and that extra charge cycle is not going to hurt anyone's feelings. However, if the hardware is still untapped, and it's a software incompetency, please just... I don't know, outsource the software to another company who might actually be able to do a better job? If more time and/or better software doesn't solve the issue, then the product is truly broken, and you've really soured a lot of your most loyal customers to your brand. Seriously, "casual" Dyson customers didn't buy this thing, your most loyal customers did, and they do a ton of your word-of-mouth marketing. And yes before anyone asks, the lens and sensors are always kept clean, rooms are well lit.

Third, a positive thing! The Nav cleans really well when it gets into the appropriate places. This is not a surprise as the cleaning power of this robot is simply benefitting from some of the oldest, most legacy parts of Dyson technology, the cyclone tech and neodymium micromotors. Nonetheless, impressive.

This is one of your most expensive products. You need to do right by your reputation.