Dyson's Vision: A Robot Vacuum That Can See

Inventor James Dyson has a long history of re-imagining the familiar. From bag-less vacuum cleaners to touch-free hand-dryers in bathrooms, these are devices that do something commonplace, but in a way no one thought of before or imagined could work. Now, with Dyson’s investing more than $8 million in a joint robotics lab at Imperial College London, some might think Dyson is branching out. They’d be wrong.

First of all, Dyson started working on robotic technology 16 years ago and it was primarily devoted to the development of — that’s right — a robot vacuum.