his little robot doesn't actually vacuum your floors (in fact, I suggest vacuuming your floors for real before running it or it will pick up a lot of dust...), but it was inspired by robot house vacuums and imitates some of their behavior.

In addition to the distance sensor that tries to spot walls and other obstacles before hitting them, the mechanical design also features a touch-sensitive bumper up front that can detect objects that the distance sensor doesn't see. A bumper would normally be made with one or two touch (pressure) sensors, but the base Inventor kit doesn't include a touch sensor, so this design uses a little trick to make one out of the color sensor.

Three different programs are provided, to experiment and show some of the different strategies that real robot vacuums use.