Abstract-In this paper we address the mobile robot localization using some techniques borrowed from the Computational Biology community. The specific problem studied here is also known as the kidnapped robot problem. Our proposal is to solve this problem by string matching algorithms, which have experienced a large advance in the last years due to (for example) the Genoma Project. The paper uses three different algorithms to solve the mentioned problem and shows their advantages, such as the robustness of the results and the memory and time efficiency. These results are validated by real experimentation using panoramic images of indoor buildings, and compared and discussed with existing techniques that have been used over the same test-bed.