Vision enhanced neuro-cognitive structure for robotic spatial cognition

This paper presents a brain inspired neural architecture with spatial cognition and navigation capability. The brain inspired system is mainly composed of two parts: a bio-inspired hierarchical vision architecture (HMAX) and a hippocampal-like circuitry. The HMAX encodes vision inputs as neural activities and maps to hippocampal-like circuitry which stores this information. Sensing a similar neural activity pattern this information can be recalled. The system is tested on a mobile robot which is placed in a spatial memory task. Among the regions in hippocampus, CA1 has place dependance response. With this property, the hippocampal-like circuitry stores the goal location according to the vision pattern, and recalls it when a similar vision pattern is seen again. The place dependent pattern of CA1 guides the motor neuronal area which then dictates the robot move to the goal location. The result of our current study indicates a possible way of connection between hippocampus and vision system, which will help robots perform a rodent-like behavior in the end.