Place Cells and Spatial Navigation Based on 2D Visual Feature Extraction, Path Integration, and Reinforcement Learning

Angelo Arleo, Fabrizio Smeraldi, Stéphane Hug, Wulfram Gerstner

Abstract: We model hippocampal place cells and head-direction cells by combin(cid:173) ing allothetic (visual) and idiothetic (proprioceptive) stimuli. Visual in(cid:173) put, provided by a video camera on a miniature robot, is preprocessed by a set of Gabor filters on 31 nodes of a log-polar retinotopic graph. Unsu(cid:173) pervised Hebbian learning is employed to incrementally build a popula(cid:173) tion of localized overlapping place fields. Place cells serve as basis func(cid:173) tions for reinforcement learning. Experimental results for goal-oriented navigation of a mobile robot are presented.