Construction of the rat brain spatial cell firing model on a quadruped robot

Abstract

Abstract Physiological studies have shown that rats in a dark environment rely on the limbs and vestibule for their self‐motion information, which can maintain the specific firing patterns of grid cells and hippocampal CA3 place cells. In the development stage of rats, grid cells are considered to come from place cells, and place cells can be encoded by hippocampal theta cells. Based on these, the quadruped robot is used as a platform in this paper. Firstly, the sensing information of the robot's limbs and inertial measurement unit is obtained to solve its position in the environment. Then the position information is encoded by theta cells and mapped to place cells through a neural network. After obtaining the place cells with single‐peak firing fields, Hebb learning is used to adjust the connection weight of the neural network between place cells and grid cells. In order to verify the model, 3‐D simulation experiments are designed in this paper. The experiment results show that with the robot exploring in space, the spatial cells firing effects obtained by the model are consistent with the physiological research facts, which lay the foundation for the bionic environmental cognition model.