At the control level, distinctive places and distinctive travel edges are identified based on the interaction between the robot's control strategies, its sensorimotor system, and the world. A distinctive place is defined as the local maximum of a distinctiveness measure appropriate to its immediate neighborhood, and is found by a hill-climbing control strategy. A distinctive travel edge, similarly, is defined by a suitable measure and a path-following control strategy. The topological network description is created by linking the distinctive places and travel edges. Metrical information is then incrementally assimilated into local geometric descriptions of places and edges, and finally merged into a global geometric map.