A mobile robot mapping model inspired from the place cells functionality of hippocampus based on dimension reduction technique

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this paper, a new mobile robot mapping algorithm inspired from the functionality of hippocampus cells is presented. Place cells in hippocampus can store a map of the environment. This model fuses odometry and vision data based on dimensionality reduction technique, hierarchically. These two types of data are first fused and then considered as inputs to the place cell model. Place cells do the clustering of places. The proposed Place cell model has two types of inputs: Grid cells input and input from the lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC). The LEC is modelled based on the dimension reduction technique. Therefore, the data that causes locations different to be inserted into the place cell from this layer. Another contribution is proposing a new unsupervised dimension reduction method based on k-means. The method can find perpendicular independent dimensions. Also, the distance of cluster centres found in these dimensions is maximised. The method was compared with LDA and PCA in standard functions. Although LDA is a supervised method, the result showed that the proposed unsupervised method outperformed. To evaluate the place cells model, sequences of images collected by a mobile robot was used and similar results to real place cells achieved.