In this paper we describe the motivation, design and implementation of a system to visually guide a locomoting robot towards a target and around obstacles. The work was inspired by a recent suggestion that walking humans rely on perceived egocentric direction rather than optic flow to guide locomotion to a target. We briefly summarise the human experimental work and then illustrate how direction based heuristics can be used in the visual guidance of locomotion. We also identify perceptual variables that could be used in the detection of obstacles and a control law for the regulation of obstacle avoidance. We describe simulations that demonstrate the utility of the approach and the implementation of these control laws on a Nomad mobile robot. We conclude that our simple biologically inspired solution produces robust behaviour and proves a very promising approach.