This paper presents the new obstacle avoidance method that is composed of vision and sonar sensors, also a navigation algorithm is proposed. Sonar sensors provide poor information because the angular resolution of each sonar sensor is not exact. So they are not suitable to detect relative direction of obstacles. In addition, it is not easy to detect the obstacle by vision sensors because of an image disturbance. In This paper, the new obstacle direction measurement method that is composed of sonar sensors for exact distance information and vision sensors for abundance information. The modified splitting/merging algorithm is proposed, and it is robuster for an image disturbance than the edge detecting algorithm, and it is efficient for grouping of the obstacle. In order to verify our proposed algorithm, we compare the proposed algorithm with the edge detecting algorithm via experiments. The direction of obstacle and the relative distance are used for the inputs of the fuzzy controller. We design the angular velocity controllers for obstacle avoidance and for navigation to center in corridor, respectively. In order to verify stability and effectiveness of our proposed method, it is apply to a vision and sonar based mobile robot navigation system.