The behavior and interplay of two types of neurons in the brain helps give humans and other animals an uncanny ability to navigate by building a mental map of their surroundings. Now one robot has been given a similar cluster of virtual cells to help it find its own way around.

Researchers in Singapore simulated two types of cells known to be used for navigation in the brain — so-called “place” and “grid” cells — and showed they could enable a small-wheeled robot to find its way around. Rather than simulate the cells physically, they created a simple two-dimensional model of the cells in software. The work was led by Haizhou Li, a professor at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR).

“Artificial grid cells could provide an adaptive and robust mapping and navigation system,” Li wrote in an e-mail coauthored with Huajin Tang, a research scientist at A*STAR, and Yuan Miaolong, a graduate student and first author on a paper about the work. “Humans and animals have an instinctual ability to navigate freely and deliberately in an environment rather effortlessly.”

The work is significant because it shows the potential for having machines mimic more complex activity in the brain. Roboticists increasingly use artificial neural networks to train robots to perform tasks such as object recognition and grasping, but these networks do not faithfully reflect the complexity and subtlety of a real biological brain.

“Neural networks are actually very loosely inspired by the brain,” says Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle. “They are distributed computing elements, but they’re very simple as compared with neurons; the connections are extremely simple as compared with a synapse.” He says this new development that takes inspiration from the brain “seems like good work.” (Read more from “This Robot Uses Artificial Brain Cells to Navigate Like a Human” HERE)

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Unlike many who believe that artificial intelligence will eventually threaten humankind, this author has a far more optimistic view:

The far future will bear traces of humanity, just as our own age retains influences of ancient civilisations. Humans and all they have thought might be a transient precursor to the deeper cogitations of another culture — one dominated by machines, extending deep into the future and spreading far beyond earth.

Not everyone considers this an uplifting scenario. There are those who fear that artificial intelligence will supplant us, taking our jobs and living beyond the writ of human laws. Others regard such scenarios as too futuristic to be worth fretting over. But the disagreements are about the rate of travel, not the direction. Few doubt that machines will one day surpass more of our distinctively human capabilities. It may take centuries but, compared to the aeons of evolution that led to humanity’s emergence, even that is a mere bat of the eye. This is not a fatalistic projection. It is cause for optimism. The civilisation that supplants us could accomplish unimaginable advances — feats, perhaps, that we cannot even understand.

Human brains, which have changed little since our ancestors roamed the African savannah, have allowed us to penetrate the secrets of the quantum and the cosmos. But there is no reason to think that our comprehension is matched to an understanding of all the important features of reality. Some day we may hit the buffers. There are chemical and metabolic limits to the size and power of “wet” organic brains.

Today’s computers do not learn like we do. Their internal network is far simpler than a human brain, but they partly make up for this disadvantage because their “nerves” transmit messages at the speed of light, millions of times faster than the chemical transmission in human brains. They can learn to identify dogs, cats and human faces by crunching through millions of images. They learn to translate from foreign languages by reading multilingual versions of millions of pages of EU rules, among other documents (and, crucially, they never get bored).

(Read more from “Cheer up, the Post-Human Era Is Dawning” HERE)

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