Neuroscience-inspired robotics

Bio-inspired Navigation

Animals navigate reliably with tiny energy budgets. We borrow their strategies for robots.

Why it matters

Teach-and-repeat lets a robot retrace a route it was shown once, using only a camera. Our bio-inspired approach is fast and robust, we have paired it with robust control, and it now runs on event cameras for high-speed, low-latency route following. Continuous attractor networks, modelled on the brain’s grid and head-direction cells, let us track trajectories across multiple scales, and threshold adaptation in spiking networks enables shortest-path finding and place disambiguation.

Team

Members of my group at the QUT Centre for Robotics and close collaborators.

Tobias Fischer Tobias Fischer
Lead
Michael Milford Michael Milford
Collaborator
Therese Joseph Therese Joseph
Former PhD student
Payam Nourizadeh Payam Nourizadeh
Former postdoc
Gokul B Nair Gokul B Nair
PhD student
Adam Hines Adam Hines
Former postdoc
Alejandro Fontan Alejandro Fontan
Collaborator

Publications

Selected papers from this line of work. See all publications.

IROS 2026

Event-Based Visual Teach-and-Repeat via Fast Fourier-Domain Cross-Correlation

Gokul Nair, Alejandro Fontan, Michael Milford, and Tobias Fischer

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems 2026

NICE 2025

Threshold Adaptation in Spiking Networks Enables Shortest Path Finding and Place Disambiguation

Robin Dietrich, Tobias Fischer, Nicolai Waniek, Nico Reeb, Michael Milford, Alois Knoll, and Adam Hines

Neuro-Inspired Computational Elements 2025

ICRA 2024

Teach and Repeat Navigation: A Robust Control Approach

Payam Nourizadeh, Michael Milford, and Tobias Fischer

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2024

IROS 2023

Trajectory Tracking via Multiscale Continuous Attractor Networks

Therese Joseph, Tobias Fischer, and Michael Milford

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems 2023

IROS 2021

Fast and Robust Bio-inspired Teach and Repeat Navigation

Dominic Dall'Osto, Tobias Fischer, and Michael Milford

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems 2021

R-SS 2021

Bio-inspired Robot Perception Coupled With Robot-modeled Human Perception

Tobias Fischer

R-SS 2021 Pioneers Workshop