Category: Neural Basis of Navigation

Insect-Inspired Robots Don’t Need GPS For Orientation

The ‘Brains on Board’ project is a collaboration between several British universities in partnership with the Human Brain Project and seeks to ‘translate’ the brains of ants and bees into algorithms that a machine will understand. Its aim is …

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A gravity-based three-dimensional compass in the mouse brain

Head direction cells in the mammalian limbic system are thought to function as an allocentric neuronal compass. Although traditional views hold that the compass of ground-dwelling species is planar, Angelaki et al. 2019 show that head-direction cells in the rodent

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NeuroSLAM : Neural Simultaneous Localization and Mapping Workshop 13-14 Mar 2019 Paris (France)

NeuroSLAM: Neural Simultaneous Localization and Mapping Workshop

 

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (or SLAM) refers to the problem of constructing a map of an unknown environment as it is actively being explored. SLAM has been treated extensively in mobile robotics, providing …

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How the brain represent 3D head direction in 3D space?

The note is an excerpt from the Shinder et al. 2019. We just describe some key conception and results in this study as a significant note. Please read the original paper if you are interested in the study on https://www.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/jn.00880.2017

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How the brain’s spatial systems organize their representation of 3D space?

The brain’s spatial map is supported by place cells, encoding current location, and grid cells, which report horizontal distance traveled by producing evenly sized and spaced foci of activity (firing fields) that tile the environment surface. Casalia et al. 2019 …

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AntBot: desert ants inspired autonomous navigation in outdoor environments

J. Dupeyroux et al. 2019 presents a navigation system inspired by desert ants’ navigation behavior, which requires precise and robust sensory modalities.

They tested several ant-inspired solutions to outdoor homing navigation problems on a legged robot using two optical sensors …

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Whether hippocampal cells can represent a spatial abstraction?

Concept cells in the human hippocampus encode the meaning conveyed by stimuli over their perceptual aspects. Baraduc et al. 2019 investigate whether analogous cells in the macaque can form conceptual schemas of spatial environments.

Each day, monkeys were presented …

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How a simple robotics model of mammal navigation is useful to interpret neurobiological recordings

Place recognition is a complex process involving idiothetic and allothetic information. In mammals, evidence suggests that visual information stemming from the temporal and parietal cortical areas (‘what’ and ‘where’ information) is merged at the level of the entorhinal cortex (EC) …

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How does the brain’s spatial map change when we change the shape of the room?

A latest report about grid cells from Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL. The following is excerpted from the report. 

Our ability to navigate the world, and form episodic memories, relies on an accurate representation of the environment around us. …

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The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014 was awarded to John O’Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser “for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain.”

A summary report of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014 on the www.nobelprize.org 

The following content is excerpted from the reference -The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2019. Thu. 10 Jan 2019.

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How the brain works on many different levels, from human interactions to the chemistry of neurotransmitters?

Video from: https://vimeo.com/249492053 

Scientists examine the brain and how it works on many different levels, from human interactions to the chemistry of neurotransmitters. This animations compares the scale of the different research subjects.

Made in collaboration with INM-1 of Forschungszentrum …

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How your brain encodes location?

A latest report titled ‘The Surprising Relativism of the Brain’s GPS’ by ADITHYA RAJAGOPALAN at Cohen Lab, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, reviewed the brief research history of the Brain’s GPS published in  NAUTILUS

For further info, please read the report …

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What if we could design an autonomous flying robot with the navigational and learning abilities of a honeybee?

Some brief introduction about  the project ‘Brains on Board: Neuromorphic Control of Flying Robots’  

What if we could design an autonomous flying robot with the navigational and learning abilities of a honeybee? Such a computationally and energy-efficient autonomous …

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Brain-inspired dynamic path replanning in autonomous navigation for robotic swarms

What do animal brains have in common with a swarm of robots? 

In an effort to improve robotic swarming algorithms, an interdisciplinary team of scientists will study how the brain allows an animal to navigate and change its route while …

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Animals Teach Robots to Find Their Way

By Chris Edwards
Communications of the ACM, August 2018, Vol. 61 No. 8, Pages 14-16. 10.1145/3231168

Mammalian research has underpinned the key models used in robot development. Analogs of neural networks found in the rat’s brain underpin the most widespread

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