Electromagnetic localization and orientation method has the advantages of high accuracy, high speed and high applicability, so that it is a reasonable choice to be used in surgical, indoor and outdoor robots. It uses alternating signals as excitation source. The generating coils (used as the excitation part) are applied with low-frequency AC currents to generate alternating electromagnetic field in space, while sensor coils (used as the sensing part) output the same frequency signal. By using the amplitude and phase information of the output signals from the sensor coils, the position and orientation information of the sensor coils related to generating coils can be calculated. In this paper, the electromagnetic localization and orientation system is presented toward the robot localization, including the magnetic model, localization algorithm and the hardware\software of the system. Two different excitation methods are used in the system, which are the time-sharing with 3-axis generating coils and phase-division with 2-axis generating coils. Sensor coils used in these two types are 3-axis coils. Experimental results show that the system can have a good accuracy with 1 mm.