Publications Details

Localization through Grid-basedEncodings on Digital Elevation Models

Wang, Felix W.; Teeter, Corinne M.; Luca, Sarah; Musuvathy, Srideep M.; Aimone, James B.

It has been demonstrated that grid cells are encoding physical locations using hexagonally spaced, periodic phase-space representations. Theories of how the brain is decoding this phase-space representation have been developed based on neuroscience data. However, theories of how sensory information is encoded into this phase space are less certain. Here we show a method on how a navigation-relevant input space such as elevation trajectories may be mapped into a phase-space coordinate system that can be decoded using previously developed theories. Just as animals can tell where they are in a local region based on where they have been, our encoding algorithm enables the localization to a position in space by integrating measurements from a trajectory over a map. In this extended abstract, we walk through our approach with simulations using a digital elevation model.