Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai Robot Vacuum Review (2026) | WIRED

TriangleUpBuy Now

Multiple Buying Options Available

$1,200 at Amazon

$1,200 at Dyson

CommentLoader-

Save StorySave this story

CommentLoader-

Save StorySave this story

Rating:7/10

Open rating explainerInformation

WIRED

Visible dustbin makes it easy to know when to clean it out. Does a good job of accurately mapping rooms. Can map multiple floors. Handles carpeting without issues.

TIRED

Base station isn’t great to look at. Too tall to get under cabinets and low furniture, and gets stuck. Not great for edge cleaning.

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