Dyson is expanding its footprint in Singapore, with a new Technology Centre opened today by the maker of vacuums and other smart home electronics. The UK company will be investing $561 million as part of its commitment to the new facility, which hosts working labs where research and development teams can pool their cumulative hardware and software know-how to help advance the company’s growing ambitions.
If you’re only passingly familiar with Dyson’s work, you might be wondering what a company that makes vacuums needs with a half-million dollar tech facility with a focus the company says is on “artificial intelligence, machine learning and software development. But Dyson has always emphasized its tech edge in the domestic cleaning hardware market, and it’s only doing more to push that advantage lately, including more work in robotics, computer visions systems and machine learning with products like its Dyson 360 Eye robot vacuum.
As you can see from the photos of the facility, the company also put a lot of engineering work into one of its most recent products, the Supersonic hair dryer. There has also been some speculation that Dyson could extend some of its expertise around electric motors and battery tech into the automotive space, though the company isn’t saying much one way or another about those reports just yet.
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Dyson’s new facility also includes what they call The Control Tower, which shows real-time supply chain and logistics data, and which they use to help ensure things run smoothly in terms of global production and shipping, and the new tech centre is very close to Dyson’s West Park production facility, where the company says one of its digital motors leaves the line every 2.6 seconds, thanks to highly automated production lines.
Dyson has already said that it will do much more in robotics, machine learning and robotics according to the engineer leading its robotics program, Mike Aldred, and it seems like this new tech center will help with those pursuits. The company has already admitted it’s working on next-generation robot vacuums, even as it launched the first, and it also says that computer vision and other tech it created for the 360 Eye will apply more broadly across its offerings.