Motivated Animat navigation: a visually guided approach

In this paper, we describe how a mobile robot only controlled by visual information can retrieve particular goal locations in an open environment according to the level of associated motivations and to its current location. The interest of our control architecture relies in its simplicity and its robustness. Our robot does not need a precise map nor to learn all the possible positions in the environment to be able to navigate correctly. The neural control architecture used is inspired from neurobiological studies about the brain visual processes and the integration of those information for navigation behaviors. We emphasize the interest to go back and forth between robotics and biology. At last we show neurobiological modelization of the hippocampus has helped us to imagine a solution for scaling our architecture to more complex problems.