Vision-Based Topological Mapping and Navigation With Self-Organizing Neural Networks

Spatial mapping and navigation are critical cognitive functions of autonomous agents, enabling one to learn an internal representation of an environment and move through space with real-time sensory inputs, such as visual observations. Existing models for vision-based mapping and navigation, however, suffer from memory requirements that increase linearly with exploration duration and indirect path following behaviors. This article presents ${e}$ -TM, a self-organizing neural network-based framework for incremental topological mapping and navigation. ${e}$ -TM models the exploration trajectories explicitly as episodic memory, wherein salient landmarks are sequentially extracted as “events” from streaming observations. A memory consolidation procedure then performs a playback mechanism and transfers the embedded knowledge of the environmental layout into spatial memory, encoding topological relations between landmarks. Fusion adaptive resonance theory (ART) networks, as the building block of the two memory modules, can generalize multiple input patterns into memory templates and, therefore, provide a compact spatial representation and support the discovery of novel shortcuts through inferences. For navigation, ${e}$ -TM applies a transfer learning paradigm to integrate human demonstrations into a pretrained locomotion network for smoother movements. Experimental results based on VizDoom, a simulated 3-D environment, have shown that, compared to semiparametric topological memory (SPTM), a state-of-the-art model, ${e}$ -TM reduces the time costs of navigation significantly while learning much sparser topological graphs.