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A multi‐sensor fusion approach for simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) based on a bio‐inspired polarised skylight sensor is presented in this study. The innovation of the proposed approach is that a newly designed bio‐inspired polarised skylight sensor, which is inspired by the navigation principle of desert ant, is introduced to improve the accuracy of SLAM. The measurement equations based on a polarised skylight sensor and a lidar are derived to obtain the orientation and position of the mobile robot and landmarks. Three kinds of non‐linear filters, extended Kalman filter (EKF), unscented Kalman filter, and particle filter, are adopted and compared to fuse the polarised skylight sensor, lidar, and odometry to estimate the position, orientation, and map in the experiments. Simulation tests and experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The simulations show that the EKF–SLAM with the polarised skylight sensor reduces the error of localisation about 30% and the error of mapping about 25%. Experiments indicate that the proposed EKF–SLAM approach can reduce the error of position and the heading angle, which verifies the proposed EKF–SLAM method, can be used for the outdoor with the low‐cost multi‐sensor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]