Successful navigation requires spatial cognition abilities, primarily the development of an accurate and flexible mental, or cognitive, map of the navigational space and of the route trajectory required to travel to the target location. To train the spatial cognition abilities and spatial memory underlying successful navigation, we translated the power of the Likova Cognitive-Kinesthetic Rehabilitation Training, initially developed for the manual domain of operation, to the domain of navigation. In the tasks requiring the mentally-performed navigational decision planning (planning the shortest or the reversed shortest path between newly-specified locations on a just memorized tactile map) and memory-guided motor execution of these decisions (accurate drawing the respective planned paths), the most significant brain activation increase was found in the two medial posterior cortical regions (DLPFC, insula), in contrast to a very little change in the lateral anterior regions (occipital V1-V4, the retrosplenial/precuneus) for most of these tasks. By extending our previous findings from the manual to the navigation domain, these results demonstrate the power of a multidisciplinary approach incorporating art, behavioral and neuroscience methodologies to drive much-needed plasticity in the adult brain.
This paper proposes a method with which mobile robots can explore unknown environments efficiently and effectively. For mobile robots, developing exploration methods in unknown environments is a challenging target. Navigation for environment monitoring is necessary in order to explore efficiently in unknown environment. Although a frontier-based exploration can be seen as a conventional method, this method is not necessarily a global optimal planning method, because it explores for the local optimal in each situation; in the monitoring task, it could fall into the local solution, because it could not take into consideration the overall observation efficiency. The proposed method exploits the whole observation and knowledge about the area of the unknown environment. It is possible for the proposed method to establish a global plan in consideration of efficiency and effectiveness by integrating pattern and frontier-based exploration. In simulation, it is shown that the proposed method of pattern and frontier-based exploration is useful for exploring unknown environments efficiently and effectively.