Bio-Inspired Topological Autonomous Navigation with Active Inference in Robotics

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: de Tinguy, Daria, Verbelen, Tim, Gamba, Emilio, Dhoedt, Bart
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author de Tinguy, Daria
Verbelen, Tim
Gamba, Emilio
Dhoedt, Bart
author_facet de Tinguy, Daria
Verbelen, Tim
Gamba, Emilio
Dhoedt, Bart
contents Achieving fully autonomous exploration and navigation remains a critical challenge in robotics, requiring integrated solutions for localisation, mapping, decision-making and motion planning. Existing approaches either rely on strict navigation rules lacking adaptability or on pre-training, which requires large datasets. These AI methods are often computationally intensive or based on static assumptions, limiting their adaptability in dynamic or unknown environments. This paper introduces a bio-inspired agent based on the Active Inference Framework (AIF), which unifies mapping, localisation, and adaptive decision-making for autonomous navigation, including exploration and goal-reaching. Our model creates and updates a topological map of the environment in real-time, planning goal-directed trajectories to explore or reach objectives without requiring pre-training. Key contributions include a probabilistic reasoning framework for interpretable navigation, robust adaptability to dynamic changes, and a modular ROS2 architecture compatible with existing navigation systems. Our method was tested in simulated and real-world environments. The agent successfully explores large-scale simulated environments and adapts to dynamic obstacles and drift, proving to be comparable to other exploration strategies such as Gbplanner, FAEL and Frontiers. This approach offers a scalable and transparent approach for navigating complex, unstructured environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_07267
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bio-Inspired Topological Autonomous Navigation with Active Inference in Robotics
de Tinguy, Daria
Verbelen, Tim
Gamba, Emilio
Dhoedt, Bart
Robotics
Achieving fully autonomous exploration and navigation remains a critical challenge in robotics, requiring integrated solutions for localisation, mapping, decision-making and motion planning. Existing approaches either rely on strict navigation rules lacking adaptability or on pre-training, which requires large datasets. These AI methods are often computationally intensive or based on static assumptions, limiting their adaptability in dynamic or unknown environments. This paper introduces a bio-inspired agent based on the Active Inference Framework (AIF), which unifies mapping, localisation, and adaptive decision-making for autonomous navigation, including exploration and goal-reaching. Our model creates and updates a topological map of the environment in real-time, planning goal-directed trajectories to explore or reach objectives without requiring pre-training. Key contributions include a probabilistic reasoning framework for interpretable navigation, robust adaptability to dynamic changes, and a modular ROS2 architecture compatible with existing navigation systems. Our method was tested in simulated and real-world environments. The agent successfully explores large-scale simulated environments and adapts to dynamic obstacles and drift, proving to be comparable to other exploration strategies such as Gbplanner, FAEL and Frontiers. This approach offers a scalable and transparent approach for navigating complex, unstructured environments.
title Bio-Inspired Topological Autonomous Navigation with Active Inference in Robotics
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07267