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Autonomous mobile robots are changing many industrial fields. Up to now their use has been limited to indoor confined applications (eg warehouse logistics) or outdoor applications in isolated areas (eg agriculture applications). In the last couple of years, due to the boom of the e-commerce, a great interest has been raised around the possibility of using robots to deliver parcels navigating city's sidewalks. Despite the enormous recent scientific and technological progress, urban environments still represent a challenge for robot autonomous navigation. In the first place, it is clear the need of a robust sidewalk level localization solution that is able to cope with GPS inaccuracies typical of urban environments. Furthermore, to navigate urban sidewalks, robots need to be extremely maneuverable and able to handle even the worst sidewalk surface conditions without getting stuck. This research aims to address these challenges by developing and experimentally validating a complete autonomous navigation solution capable of navigating urban sidewalks. An autonomous mobile robot named YAPE (Your Autonomous Pony Express) is designed from scratch based on a two wheeled self-balancing configuration. This design, although more difficult to control compared to other robots, guarantees great maneuverability and the flexibility to handle sidewalk irregularities. A method to map large scale urban areas is also developed. Using a map-based localization system, sidewalk level localization is proved even in GPS degraded and denied environments. The complete autonomous navigation system has been extensively tested in real-world situations on …