Stuff Gadget Guide - UK - Issue 5 (2022-01)

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TESTED DYSON 360 HEURIST

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GOOD

MEH

EVIL

Serious

monster

truck vibes

Tracks are

better than

wheels

Pretty noisy

on max

power

Keeps

bumping

into things

No more

manual

hoovering!

[ Words

Ross Presly

]

If you’ve been thinking about getting a robot

to do your vacuuming and you’re a sucker for

the Dyson brand, the Heurist is here for you

Four years after Dyson’s original

360 Eye robot vac launched, and

nearly two years after it went

on sale in China, the 360 Heurist

version finally arrived over here

last spring. Quite why it took so

long to reach the UK we’re not

sure – perhaps it had to pootle

here under its own steam.

Supposedly smarter and with

more memory than the 360 Eye,

it’ll continuously learn about the

space it’s being employed to

clean and keep getting better

at its job. In addition, the digital

motor inside it is 20% suckier and

the brushes are twice as stiff as

on the previous model. But the

bin dimensions stay the same. Ah

well, guess we’ll just be emptying

it more often...

We can’t tell if the new blue

colourway will have an effect

on how well it cleans, but in the

run-up to its delivery we didn’t

vacuum for two weeks and

deliberately ate lots of toast

without plates. Time to find out

if it got all those crumbs.

£800 / stuff.tv/Heurist

Lights, camera, suction

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Let’s get ready to trundle

Tank tracks (2) and a full-width

suction bar at the back mean this

robot actually cleans pretty much

everywhere it goes – there are no

little brushes trying to push debris

in towards a central sucker here.

It gets fairly close to walls, but

you will still need to do your edges

manually every now and then.

Don’t nudge me

Scanning the environment quicker

than Batman’s Nokia, the 360º

fisheye cam at the top (3) takes

a reading every 20ms so it always

knows where it is. They call this

Simultaneous Localisation And

Mapping, or SLAM for the nerds...

but it doesn’t stop it bopping into

things from time to time.

We’ve only dust begun

Definitely more of a monster

truck than a low rider, the Heurist

towers over other robot vacs at

12cm tall (1)... and consequently

struggles to get under some

furniture. Going vertical has other

benefits, though: it’ll squeeze into

tighter corners than many of its

frisbee-like rivals.

Wish it held

more dirt

and filth