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Yessi Pratiwi — July 9, 2007 / 6:40 pm
One of the challenges in robot navigation is to enable machines to create maps of their surrounding environment, while working out their location at the same time – a challenge known as simultaneous localization. A robot controlled by a simulated rat brain has proved itself to be a remarkable mimic of rodent behaviour in series of classic animal experiments.
The robot’s biologically-inspired control software uses a functional model of “place cells”. These are neurons in an area of the brain called the hippocampus that help real rats to map their environment. They fire when an animal is in a familiar location.
Before it, Richard Morris has experimented the robot tasks, 1980s. Then, Alfredo Weitzenfeld, a roboticist at the ITAM technical institute in Mexico City, found that the robot could recognise places it had already visited, distinguish between locations that looked alike, and figure out roughly where it was when placed in an unfamiliar part of a maze, after just a single training session.
This could make a big difference when it comes to making more robust control software for robots. It increases the complexity, but gives us a better understanding of the true complexity found in real and artificial systems.
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