Bio-Inspired Autonomous Learning Algorithm With Application to Mobile Robot Obstacle Avoidance

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are often considered the third generation of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), owing to their high information processing capability and the accurate simulation of biological neural network behaviors. Though the research for SNNs has been quite active in recent years, there are still some challenges to applying SNNs to various potential applications, especially for robot control. In this study, a biologically inspired autonomous learning algorithm based on reward modulated spike-timing-dependent plasticity is proposed, where a novel rewarding generation mechanism is used to generate the reward signals for both learning and decision-making processes. The proposed learning algorithm is evaluated by a mobile robot obstacle avoidance task and experimental results show that the mobile robot with the proposed algorithm exhibits a good learning ability. The robot can successfully avoid obstacles in the environment after some learning trials. This provides an alternative method to design and apply the bio-inspired robot with autonomous learning capability in the typical robotic task scenario.