More is known of the navigation skills of mice and rats than of any other vertebrate. The discovery of place cells (cells whose firing rate correlates with the spatial position of the animal) in the rat’s hippoc ampus has inspired various attempts to model these cells. This work presents one such model which has been optimized on simulated autonomous agents and implemented on a mobile robot which learns to navigate within its environment through exploration using vision as its main sensory modal ity. The artificial mouse robot aMouse, a mobile robot with active whiskers and omnidirectional vision, is presented as an ideal robotic platform to study rodent navigation. The visual field of the robot is similar to the large visual field of rats and mice, and its whisker system uses real rat whiskers for tex ture recognition. The paper suggests how tactile information from the active whisker array on the robot can be used as an additional sensory modality for the place cell model described earlier.
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