A prototype system has been built to navigate a walking robot into a ship structure. The 8-legged robot is equipped with a stereo head. From the CAD-model of the ship good viewpoints are selected such that the head can look at locations with sufficient edge features, which are extracted automatically for each view. The pose of the robot is estimated from the features detected by two vision approaches. One approach searches ∗ This work has been mainly supported by the RobVision project Esprit 28867 and is partly supported by the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) under grant P13167-MAT and EU-Project GRD1-1999-10693 FlexPaint. 1