RatSLAM: a hippocampal model for simultaneous localization and mapping

Abstract

The work presents a new approach to the problem of simultaneous localization and mapping - SLAM - inspired by computational models of the hippocampus of rodents. The rodent hippocampus has been extensively studied with respect to navigation tasks, and displays many of the properties of a desirable SLAM solution. RatSLAM is an implementation of a hippocampal model that can perform SLAM in real time on a real robot. It uses a competitive attractor network to integrate odometric information with landmark sensing to form a consistent representation of the environment. Experimental results show that RatSLAM can operate with ambiguous landmark information and recover from both minor and major path integration errors.