This book brings together the fields of robot spatial mapping and cognitive spatial mapping, which share some common core problems. One would reasonably expect some cross-fertilisations of research between the two areas to have occurred, and this has happened but only recently. There are signs that both fields have matured and that efforts to cross-fertilise are happening, but it is neither complete nor common yet.

Robot spatial mapping, in this book, is about the problem of a robot computing a representation of its environment from data gathered by its sensors. This problem has been studied since the creation of the first autonomous mobile robot in the late nineteen-sixties. People and animals also compute a representation of their environment, which is commonly referred to as a cognitive map. Cognitive spatial mapping is about the problem of computing a cognitive map, and has been studied extensively by many researchers of disparate backgrounds.

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