Mike Aldred was hired by high-end appliance maker Dyson in 1998 with the goal of creating a robotic vacuum. Aldred was familiar with founder James Dyson’s legendary perfectionism, but even that didn’t prepare him for the task that lay ahead. For the next 18 years he worked this singular idea without a single commercial product release to show for his troubles.
So it was a very happy Aldred who greeted me in a SoHo loft in lower Manhattan to show off the Dyson 360 Eye, its first and only robotic vacuum cleaner. "For us, it had to be a vacuum cleaner first, and then it was automated, rather than a robot that’s had a vacuum cleaner added to it," he explained. "Everything else we’ve seen to date coming out on the market didn’t really...
