Aiming at the visual target detecting and tracking performed by a mobile robotthe background and significance of the research are expoundedand the difficulties in the research are analyzed.Thenaccording to the types of feature representation and the detecting stepsa comparative analysis is made on the advantages and disadvantages of the following four types of target detection algorithmsi.e.traditional target detection algorithmscandidate region based target detection algorithmsregression-based target detection algorithms and reinforcement learning based target detection algorithms.Furthera comparative analysis is conducted on the performance of the following visual tracking algorithms in four stagesi.e.traditional tracking algorithmssparse representation based tracking algorithmscorrelation filter based tracking algorithms and deep learning based tracking algorithms.Finallythe limitations of current methods are summarizedand the directions for future improvement are pointed out.