This was the project for my FdSc in Computing at South Devon College in 2010. It was adapted from a child's remote control K9 toy, of which only the shell remained. It was built around a VIA EPIA PX1000G Pico ITX PC board running Windows XP. I turned it into an autonomous self mapping robot programmed in Visual Basic. The full project blog is still here http://sdcom206-k9.blogspot.com/
You can see some videos here. The last one shows it mapping out a square with a little physical help to overcome the heavy carpet pile.