Remarkable and impressive advancements in the areas of perception, mapping and navigation of artificial mobile systems have been witnessed in the last decades. However, it is clear that important limitations remain regarding the spatial cognition capabilities of existing available implementations and the current practical functionality of high level cognitive models [1, 2]. For enhanced robustness and flexibility in different kinds of real world scenarios, a deeper understanding of the environment, the system, and their interactions -in general terms- is desired. This long abstract aims at outlining connections between recent contributions in the above mentioned areas and research in cognitive architectures and biological systems. We try to summarize, integrate and update previous reviews, highlighting the main open issues and aspects not yet unified or integrated in a common architectural framework