Despite its omnipresence in robotics application, the nature of spatial knowledge and the mechanisms that underlie its emergence in autonomous agents are still poorly understood. Recent theoretical works suggest that the Euclidean structure of space induces invariants in an agent's raw sensorimotor experience. We hypothesize that capturing these invariants is beneficial for sensorimotor prediction and that, under certain exploratory conditions, a motor representation capturing the structure of the external space should emerge as a byproduct of learning to predict future sensory experiences. We propose a simple sensorimotor predictive scheme, apply it to different agents and types of exploration, and evaluate the pertinence of these hypotheses. We show that a naive agent can capture the topology and metric regularity of its sensor's position in an egocentric spatial frame without any a priori knowledge, nor extraneous supervision.
@cite_39: Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) consists in the concurrent construction of a model of the environment (the map ), and the estimation of the state of the robot moving within it. The SLAM community has made astonishing progress over the last 30 years, enabling large-scale real-world applications and witnessing a steady transition of this technology to industry. We survey the current state of SLAM and consider future directions. We start by presenting what is now the de-facto standard formulation for SLAM. We then review related work, covering a broad set of topics including robustness and scalability in long-term mapping, metric and semantic representations for mapping, theoretical performance guarantees, active SLAM and exploration, and other new frontiers. This paper simultaneously serves as a position paper and tutorial to those who are users of SLAM. By looking at the published research with a critical eye, we delineate open challenges and new research issues, that still deserve careful scientific investigation. The paper also contains the authors’ take on two questions that often animate discussions during robotics conferences: Do robots need SLAM? and Is SLAM solved?
Only a quick overview of the large literature related to spatial representation learning is given here, leaving aside approaches where the spatial structure of the problem is largely hard-coded @cite_39 .