Self-organizing cellular systems for sequential active perception on a mobile robot

This research projects takes inspiration from the human brain as a fruitful hint towards the design of a computational architecture able to understand natural scenes. More precisely, in the case of visual understanding, many works in biology and psychology stressed that vision is rather a sequential palpation of details than a global computation of the whole surrounding scene. This palpation is driven by neural structures, based on highly coupled populations of elementary computing units, i.e. the neurons, whose dynamics leads to a global, robust and harmonious signal processing resulting in a given animal behaviour. Such properties are, on the one hand, the result of evolution which brought the anatomical structure of our brains to maturity. They are also due, on the other hand, to the massive self-organization processes inside the brain, at the timescale of an individual’s