MoNETA (Modular NEural Traveling Agent) swims in the virtual Morris Water Maze

The goal of the MOdular Neural Exploring Traveling Agent (MoNETA) project undergoing at the Neuromorphics Lab at Boston University is to develop an animat that can intelligently interact and learn to navigate a virtual world making decisions aimed at increasing rewards while avoiding danger. The animat, which is a virtual agent living in a virtual environment, is designed to be modular: a whole brain system, initially including fairly simple modules, will be progressively refined with more complex and adaptive modules, and will be tested in increasingly more challenging environment. The animat brain is designed in Cog Ex Machina (Cog), the software realized by HP in collaboration with Boston University in the DARPA SyNAPSE project.

Cog, which can run on CPUs, GPUs, and will run on memristive-based devices, allows to pack large-scale, highly interconnected, plastic, heterogeneous neural models that make up the animat brain in a low-power, high density chip which is suitable for implementing portable petascale neural-based computing. The current plan is for the animat to replicate a classic rat experiment, the Morris Water Maze (left), by Fubruary 2011, and progressively simulate more complex mazes used in rat experiments. Further evolution of the model will use the Iterative Evolution of Models (ItEM) project software.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• memristors
• artificial intelligence
• neural networks
• animat
• synapse
• neuromorphic lab
• boston university
• celest