Abstract: According to the specialties of the area-covering mobile robots working in the outdoor environment,a new solution to the boundary set-up and identification of unmarked operational area is proposed.The designed localization system with combined sensors serves robots reliably to establish and identify boundaries of the operational area.Boundary map is established based on the subsection acquisition strategy,and its performance is analyzed and compared with the continuous acquisition strategy.The RBF neural network is designed for mobile robots to acquire the accurate and real-time localization information.The results of experiment show that the localization system and the solution can guarantee the successful establishment and identification of operational area boundary,mobile robots with the engineering practicability can complete the task of covering every part of the operational area.