Review: Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai Robot Vacuum

Dyson’s first robot vacuum and mop has arrived, and after letting it clean every floor of my home, I find myself satisfied but not overly impressed.

The Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai does a good job of vacuuming and mopping, and its unique base station design with a visible dustbin gives it a distinctly Dyson look. But the vacuum's height and limited camera view leave it struggling to vacuum my kitchen and the bathroom cabinet toe-kick area, and it even gets stuck under my low bed frame if left unsupervised. It uses AI to spot stains—and an HD camera, which Dyson promises will keep footage only on the device—but it didn't manage to scrub away all the stains I intentionally created while testing.

Overall, it's a good robot vacuum, and anyone looking for an automated way to mop and vacuum will likely be happy with it, especially if you have furniture and cabinets with higher ground clearance or that are entirely flush with the floor.

Homing Station

Photograph: Nena Farrell

The Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai works pretty similarly to most other robot vacuums. You set up the base station and the robot vacuum together, connecting them to Wi-Fi and the Dyson app. Then, it can start mapping your home.

I have a three-story townhouse, and the Spot+Scrub took only about five minutes to map each floor. It did a good job mapping the different rooms in my upper floor, but since my lower main floor is mostly one large great room, I had to edit the map to differentiate the kitchen, dining area, and living space (the third floor is too small to be useful for testing). It wasn't hard to do, but the Dyson app doesn't detect things like my kitchen island, so it was harder to edit the map precisely since I had to guess where objects were. When it comes time to clean a particular floor, I just carry it up and down the stairs.

The base station for the Spot+Scrub has a new design. While the older Dyson 360 Vis Nav had a minimalist charging base, the Spot+Scrub gets a much larger unit to support its mopping ability. That larger base has three distinct cylinders atop it: one for clean water, one for dirty water, and a clear one for dry debris that looks similar to the dustbin you'd see on a Dyson vacuum.

Is it an eyesore to always see the dust and debris? Yes, especially since the base station is in the middle of my home. But it does make it easy for me to know when to dump it out, and the bagless design is less wasteful than the bagged design you'll find on other robot vacuums.

Tall Boy

Photograph: Nena Farrell

The Spot+Scrub’s biggest problem is its size. At about 4.25 inches tall, it can’t get under my cabinets, which are 4 inches high, much to my and the vacuum’s chagrin. The Spot+Scrub would desperately bump into my cabinets over and over, trying its hardest to reach the edges to clean them. It's unusual to see this; the Spot+Scrub carefully avoids all other obstacles, but because the cabinet overhang is just high enough to be out of the camera's sight, it misinterprets the height clearance.

The vacuum failed to clean up two of the three test Cheerios that I strategically placed around my main floor to see which nooks and crannies it could reach. Both had small overhangs (one was an Ikea Billy bookshelf and the other a freestanding cabinet) that the Spot+Scrub couldn't get under. It doesn't have an extendable arm to help fix the issue.

I ran into a similar issue upstairs. My bathroom cabinets are the same basic builder-grade set as my downstairs kitchen, but the Spot+Scrub managed to wedge itself underneath my primary bathroom cabinets and then struggled to remove itself. It did the same thing with my low bed frame, forcing itself underneath after many attempts, and then it couldn't get out. I marked the bed as a no-cleaning zone in the app, but, like the kitchen island, since the Dyson map doesn't know where my bed is, I had to guesstimate, leaving a good portion of the bedroom without any vacuuming.

Photograph: Nena Farrell

Still, it did a good job of cleaning my upstairs carpet. While this robot vacuum can map multiple floors, the operation wasn't as completely smooth as I had hoped. When the Spot+Scrub finishes cleaning on a floor without a base station, it'll return to the starting position. Once you move it to the dock, it'll just start charging without emptying. That means when it goes to work on my main floor, the mop pad isn't cleaned, dry debris is still left in the vacuum, and the dirty water chamber isn't dried. It's almost like it resets itself, forgetting its last function.

So if you're using it on multiple floors, save the one with the docking station for last. I ended up having the Spot+Scrub clean my main floor after the upstairs, just to make sure the vacuum would be fully emptied and dried. You also have to activate the cleaning function while the robot is still in its docking station, so it can prep for mopping, then pause the cleaning (you can do this in the Dyson app or on the vacuum itself) once it rolls out of the docking station to then lift and move it to another floor.

AI Wars

Photograph: Nena Farrell

Of course, there's the feature this vacuum is named for: its built-in AI that spots stains and scrubs them away. The Spot+Scrub uses an HD camera to inspect the floors, then uses AI to analyze what it sees and know when to scrub trouble spots. It'll go back and forth over those spots, and the AI will calculate how often it needs to do so to remove the stain.

It's hard to see this AI in action, especially after testing the similar Shark PowerDetect UV Reveal. The Shark robot vacuum will return to the docking station, then announce it's headed back out to treat stains it spotted during its cleaning run. The Spot+Scrub will include scrubbing during its run, but it's difficult to tell if it's actually doing it. I also didn't see it work very well; I set up two cherry-stain spots to see if it would clean both, and it only managed to scrub one spot away. The other spot didn't have any more coloring but was still sticky, even after a second run of the vacuum.

I did occasionally notice the Dyson going back and forth over other spots, but I really didn't see it activated as much as my Shark. Maybe it's because the Shark already removed a lot of stains when I tested it last month, but with a preschooler and a cat, I'm sure there are plenty more for the Spot+Scrub to find.

Overall, it's a good vacuum and mop, and it's priced pretty competitively. But you can probably get a smarter vacuum from the likes of Dreame or Shark, which have impressed other WIRED reviewers and me more with their cleaning abilities and additional features.