Local image features are used for a wide range of applications in computer vision and range imaging. While there is a great variety of detector-descriptor combinations for image data and 3D point clouds, there is no general method readily available for 2D range data. For this reason, the paper first proposes a set of benchmark experiments on detector repeatability and descriptor matching performance using known indoor and outdoor data sets for robot navigation. Secondly, the paper introduces FLIRT that stands for Fast Laser Interest Region Transform, a multi-scale interest region operator for 2D range data. FLIRT combines the best detector with the best descriptor, experimentally found in a comprehensive analysis of alternative detector and descriptor approaches. The analysis yields repeatability and matching performance results similar to the values found for features in the computer vision literature, encouraging a wide range of applications of FLIRT on 2D range data. We finally show how FLIRT can be used in conjunction with RANSAC to address the loop closing/global localization problem in SLAM in indoor as well as outdoor environments. The results demonstrate that FLIRT features have a great potential for robot navigation in terms of precision-recall performance, efficiency and generality.