Abstract: To meet the requirements of unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) autonomous navigation in complex urban environments, a positioning navigation method was proposed based on geographic information system (GIS) with strong information storage and management capabilities. It includes GIS database construction, map matching and path planning, as well as capture prior and real-time information of the traffic and surrounding environment. The developed method has been successfully used in the IN2BOT UGV that fulfilled the Chinese Intelligent Vehicle Future Challenge sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation, and the Unmanned Ground System Challenge held by the Army Equipment Department for several times. Outstanding results achieved in many similar national competitions demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method.