NCS-FO: Foundations of Biologically Informed Intelligent Machines for Spatial Navigation

While mammals evolved some of the largest brains in the animal kingdom, fruit flies, despite their miniature brains, exhibit remarkably sophisticated capabilities. They can navigate and fly in most wind conditions, and maneuver directly towards or evasively away from stimuli while remembering their location, as well as rest or walk in any angular orientation even in the dark. The smaller brain of the navigationally agile fruit fly thus presents a good road map for studying the fundamental principles of spatio-temporal navigation. Recent studies have shown that a brain area called the central complex (CX) gives rise to the internal compass and spatial memory of the fruit fly. The CX also exhibits ``hardware'' simplicity, efficiency and robust operation matched by scalable integration of sensory information. The CX circuit architecture is a prime candidate for building biologically informed intelligent machines for spatial navigation. The overriding goal of this project is to create silicon hardware that can incorporate the essence of the spatial-navigation circuits of the CX into neuromorphic hardware. By interweaving the two research directions of computational neuroscience and computer engineering, the project has a strong potential to develop an intelligent machine prototype for spatial navigation meeting the most demanding requirements of autonomous vehicles.

The goals of this project are three-fold: (1) distill the foundations underlying the navigation circuits in the CX, (2) expand upon its principles of computation and (3) provide an implementation of the resulting functionality in silicon. Achieving these goals calls for (i) developing a comprehensive, biologically informed circuit architecture for vision-based spatial navigation, (ii) investigating the circuit mechanisms that encode and store spatio-temporal information, and (iii) studying the roles that different types of visual information flows play in shaping the decision making circuits of the CX. Informed by this bio-architecture, the investigators will develop a silicon CX prototype that will substantially enhance programmability, size, power, and accuracy over conventional neuromorphic architectures.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.