Start date should be earlier than end date. OK Please enter valid date format.

Original Research ARTICLE

Unsupervised learning of reflexive and action-based affordances to model adaptive navigational behavior

Daniel Weiller^1*, Leonhard Läer¹, Andreas K. Engel² and Peter König¹

Institute of Cognitive Science, Department of Neurobiopsychology, University of Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Germany

Department of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany

Here we introduce a cognitive model capable to model a variety of behavioral domains and apply it to a navigational task. We used place cells as sensory representation, such that the cells’ place fields divided the environment into discrete states. The robot learns knowledge of the environment by memorizing the sensory outcome of its motor actions. This is composed of a central process, learning the probability of state-to-state transitions by motor actions and a distal processing routine, learning the extent to which these state-to-state transitions are caused by sensory-driven reflex behavior (obstacle avoidance). Navigational decision making integrates central and distal learned environmental knowledge to select an action that leads to a goal state. Differentiating distal and central processing increases the behavioral accuracy of the selected actions and the ability of behavioral adaptation to a changed environment. We propose that the system can canonically be expanded to model other behaviors, using alternative definitions of states and actions. The emphasis of this paper is to test this general cognitive model on a robot in a real-world environment.

Keywords:

place cells, navigation, reflexes, four-arm-maze, unsupervised learning, adaptive behavior

Citation:

Weiller D, Läer L, Engel AK and König P (2010). Unsupervised learning of reflexive and action-based affordances to model adaptive navigational behavior. Front. Neurorobot. 4:2. doi: 10.3389/fnbot.2010.00002

Received:

21 September 2009;

Paper pending published:

05 October 2009;

Accepted:

22 February 2010;

Published online:

12 May 2010.

Edited by:

Max Lungarella, University of Zurich, Switzerland

Reviewed by:

Poramate Manoonpong, University of Goettingen, Germany
Verena V. Hafner, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany

© 2010 Weiller, Läer, Engel and König. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

*Correspondence:

Daniel Weiller, Institut fur Kognitionswissenschaft, Neurobiopsychologie, Universtat Osnabrück, Albrechtstrasse 28, 49069 Osnabrück, Germany.e-mail: dweiller@uos.de