To achieve the dream of autonomous vehicles and robots, it’s going to take much more than computer vision and artificial intelligence. Cars, drones, delivery bots, even our vacuum cleaners and robot chefs are going to need something that our ancestors developed millions of years ago: a sense of place.

“I definitely don’t think people understand how reliant autonomous cars are on the fidelity of the map,” says Mary Cummings, a professor of mechanical, electrical and computer engineering at Duke University. “If the map is wrong...