Crossmodal Learning and Prediction of Autobiographical Episodic Experiences using a Sparse Distributed Memory

Abstract

This work develops a connectionist memory model for a service robot that satisfies a number of desiderata: associativity, vagueness, approximation, robustness, distribution and paral-lelism. A biologically inspired and mathematically sound theory of a highly distributed and sparse memory serves as the basis for this work. The so-called sparse distributed memory (SDM), developed by P. Kanerva, corresponds roughly to a random-access memory (RAM) of a conventional computer but permits the processing of considerably larger address spaces. Complex structures are represented as binary feature vectors. The model is able to produce expectations of world states and complement partial sensory patterns of an environment based on memorised experience. Caused by objects of the world, previously learnt experi-ences will activate pattern sequences in the memory and claim the system’s attention. In this work, the sparse distributed memory concept is mainly considered a biologically inspired and content-addressable memory structure. It is used to implement an autobiographical long-term memory for a mobile service-robot to store and retrieve episodic sensor and actuator patterns.