AbstractThis paper describes ongoing research on vision based mobile robot navigation for wheel chairs. After a guided tour through a natural environment while taking images at regular time intervals, natural landmarks are extracted to automatically build a topological map. Later on this map can be used for place recognition and navigation. We use visual servoing on the landmarks to steer the robot. In this paper, we investigate ways to improve the performance by incorporating inertial sensors. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.