An Episodic Memory Model with Slow Features Extraction for Topological Map Building

This paper presents a new integration model for on-line topological map building with environment slow features detection. The proposed model is formed by the integration of Bayesian Adaptive Resonance Associative Memory (BARAM) and Incremental Slow Feature Analysis (IncSFA). IncSFA incrementally extracts slowly varying features from a rapidly changing input signal. These slow features will be fed to BARAM for environment learning to build a topological map. The explored environment is represented as a set of neurons (nodes) and edges that connecting all nodes. Each neuron represents a distinct place and edges store robot traverse information that leads the robot to travel from one node to another. The proposed model is an unsupervised learning technique that does not require any prior knowledge of what an environment is supposed to be for ease of implementation. The effectiveness of our proposed method is validated by several standardized benchmark datasets.