Cleaning robots are great and all, but they don’t really excel when it comes to speed. If your room looks like a pigsty and your Tinder date is arriving in twenty minutes, you’ll need more than a Roomba to make a good impression. [Luis Marx] ran into this exact problem and decided to solve it by building the world’s fastest cleaning robot (video, embedded below).

[Luis] built his ‘bot from the ground up, inspired by the design of your average robot vacuum: round, with two driven wheels and some sensors to avoid obstacles. A sturdy aluminium plate forms the chassis, onto which two powerful motors are placed to drive a pair of large-diameter wheels. The robot’s body is made from 3D-printed components and sports a huge LED display on top that functions as a speedometer of sorts.

Building a vacuum system turned out to be rather difficult, and since [Luis] already had a robot vacuum anyway, he decided to make this a robot mop instead. A little tank stores water and soap, which is pumped onto a microfibre cloth that’s attached using a magnetic strip. Obstacle avoidance is implemented through three ultrasonic distance sensors: when the robot is about to run into something it will brake and turn in the direction where it senses the most empty space.

All of that sounds great, but what about the speed? According to [Luis]’s calculations, it should be able to reach 60 km/h, although his living room is too small to put that into practice. Whether it will provide much in the way of cleaning at that speed is debatable too, but who cares: having your own ultra-high-speed robot mop will definitely impress your date more than any amount of cleaning.

We’ve featured a home-made robot mop before, but it looks excruciatingly slow compared to this one. If you’re planning to build zippy indoor robots, you might want to look into fast navigation systems like tracking ceiling lights.

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