In this research, we proposed and developed the obstacle detection technique and a combination of the potential field with the local incremental planning methods for autonomous navigation with obstacle avoidance ability for the car-like robot. This car robot is equipped with GPS, IMU, and laser range finder sensors. First, the proposed method is tested by simulating the robot in MATLAB/Simulink: 1) the obstacle detection using the occupancygrid map, consisting of the local- and globalgrid map, which can identify the obstacle location according to the probability of occurrence and 2) auton-omous navigation for the car-like robot, which pursues the target and avoids fixed obstacles along its path