Self-organizing Internal Representation in Learning of Navigation: A Physical Experiment by the Mobile Robot YAMABICO

This paper discusses a novel scheme for sensory-based navigation of a mobile robot. In our previous work ([Tani and Fukumura, 1994], Neural Networks, 7(3), 553-563), we formulated the problem of goal-directed navigation as an embedding problem of dynamical systems: desired trajectories in a task space should be embedded in an adequate sensory-based internal state space so that a unique mapping from the internal state space to the motor command could be established. In the current formulation a recurrent neural network is employed, which shows that an adequate internal state space can be self-organized, through supervised training with sensorimotor sequences. The experiment was conducted using a real mobile robot equipped with a laser range sensor, demonstrating the validity of the presented scheme by working in a noisy real-world environment. Copyright 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.