Robot navigation as hierarchical active inference

Localization and mapping has been a long standing area of research, both in neuroscience, to understand how mammals navigate their environment, as well as in robotics, to enable autonomous mobile robots. In this paper, we treat navigation as inferring actions that minimize (expected) variational free energy under a hierarchical generative model. We find that familiar concepts like perception, path integration, localization and mapping naturally emerge from this active inference formulation. Moreover, we show that this model is consistent with models of hippocampal functions, and can be implemented in silico on a real-world robot. Our experiments illustrate that a robot equipped with our hierarchical model is able to generate topologically consistent maps, and correct navigation behaviour is inferred when a goal location is provided to the system. (C) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This paper explores an active inference navigation approach based on a hierarchical generative model, demonstrating consistency with hippocampal function models and implementation on real-world robots. Experimental results show that robots equipped with this model can generate consistent maps and infer correct navigation behavior when a goal location is provided to the system.