Robot spatial learning: Insights from animal and human behaviour

Robotics research could benefit by looking for clues in the understanding of natural systems for the design of artificial systems. The literature on spatial learning suggests that there is a great diversity of solutions to the problem of learning and navigating a large-scale system. There are characteristic properties that extend across species that may be applicable for designing autonomous mobile robots. Natural navigation systems have a common trait relating to the use of multiple subsystems for the control of behavior and the exploitation of dynamic, quantitative representations of space.