Understanding how the brain organizes and accesses spatial information — where we are, what’s around the corner, how to get there — remains an exquisite challenge. The process involves recalling an entire network of memories and stored spatial data from tens of billions of neurons, each connected to thousands of others. Neuroscientists have identified key elements such as grid cells, neurons that map locations. But going deeper will prove tricky: It’s not as though researchers can remove and study slices of human gray matter to watch how location-based memories of images, sounds and smells flow through and connect to each other.

Artificial intelligence offers another way in. For years, neuroscientists have harnessed many types of neural networks — the engines that power most deep learning applications — to model the firing of neurons in the brain. In recent work, researchers have shown that the hippocampus, a structure of the brain critical to memory, is basically a special kind of neural net, known as a transformer, in disguise. Their new model tracks spatial information in a way that parallels the inner workings of the brain. They’ve seen remarkable success.

“The fact that we know these models of the brain are equivalent to the transformer means that our models perform much better and are easier to train,” said James Whittington, a cognitive neuroscientist who splits his time between Stanford University and the lab of Tim Behrens at the University of Oxford.

Recent technological advancements have paved the way for the creation of increasingly sophisticated robotic systems designed to autonomously complete missions in different familiar and unfamiliar environments. Robots meant to operate in uncertain or remote environments could greatly benefit from the ability to actively acquire electrical power from their surroundings.

Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Imperial College London, and University of Illinois Urbana Champaign have recently developed a new robotic system that can visually rearrange its surroundings to receive the maximum amount of energy from a given power source. This robot, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv and set to be presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics, works by drawing electrical circuits using conductive ink.

“Our PLOS ONE work started off as a quite philosophical thought experiment,” Andre Rosendo, the professor who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “Nietzsche claims that human’s primal instinct is power, and survival is just a condition sine qua non we couldn’t reach that final goal. Based on this idea, we started to devise experimental settings where our robot could not only act to survive, but to thrive.”