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.