Within their home range, rodents and other mammals navigate by updating their position through (internal) signals derived from locomotion and by using landmark-place associations. Single unit recordings in freely moving rats show that motion cues and external, mainly visual information act on place and head direction cells in the hippocampus and functionally related brain areas. Currently, a number of partially converging and diverging neural network models aim at representing the neural system that controls rodent navigation. It is argued that the attempt to build self-steering robots on the basis of behavioural and neurophysiological results from rodents and of computer simulations of these results is premature, given the lack of consensus in the literature on mammalian navigation.