Abstract: Outdoor intelligent autonomous mobile robot that will be applied widely is one of hotspots in the research of the robot. This paper analyzes some representative outdoor mobile robots, and surveys the study status and the development of the key techniques in the research of the outdoor autonomous mobile robots. The key techniques include the control architecture of mobile robots, the real-time processing of robot visual informations, the position system of the vehicle, the integration and fusion of multisensor informations, the path planning and the vehicle control.