A landmark based navigation system for robotic wheelchairs is developed. The proposed navigation system is robust in the localization procedure which is the major problem in robotic navigation systems. Every landmark is composed of a segment of metallic path and a radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag. The odometry information is used for localization, which is corrected on-line every time the robotic wheelchair is over a landmark. A topological map is generated using such landmarks to compute the shortest path. A technique to generate the topological map for this navigation system and an obstacle avoidance strategy are also developed. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.