Robot localization has been a very challenging task in mobile robotics since it in essential for a broad range of mobile robot tasks. This thesis proposes a new vision-based robot localization and map-building algorithm. Via the proposed algorithm, a robot can plan a shortest path to visit some particular locations pre-specifies by the user. This algorithm has the global searching characteristic that from Genetic Algorithm, also combines the localized searching feature with A* path evaluation standard rule. There can be schemed a reasonable path itself with this algorithm. Finally, both simulations and the practical experiments demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed schemes