Cyclic AMP (cAMP) and calcium are ubiquitous, interdependent second messengers that regulate a wide range of cellular processes. During development of neuronal networks they are critical for the first step of circuit formation, transducing signals required for axon pathfinding. Surprisingly, the spatial and temporal cAMP and calcium codes used by axon guidance molecules are unknown. Here, we id...

We want to compute geometric shortest paths in a collection of convex traversable polygons, also known as a navigation mesh. Simple to compute and easy to update, navigation meshes are widely used for pathfinding in computer games. When the mesh is static, shortest path problems can be solved exactly and very fast but only after a costly preprocessing step. When the mesh is dynamic, practitione...

During Drosophila visual system development, photoreceptor (R) axons choose their correct paths and targets in a step-wise fashion. R axons with different identities make specific pathfinding decisions at different stages during development. We show here that the transmembrane protein Golden goal (Gogo), which is dynamically expressed in all R neurons and localizes predominantly to growth cones...

The neural cell adhesion molecule L1 has been found to play important roles in axon growth and fasciculation. Our main objective was to determine the role of L1 during the development of connections between thalamus and cortex. We find that thalamocortical and corticothalamic axons in mice lacking L1 are hyperfasciculated, a subset of thalamocortical axons make pathfinding errors and thalamocor...

Shepherding with a dog presents an interesting challenge for artificial intelligence, with multiple intelligent systems assessing and interacting with each other in order to achieve a variety of goals. We present a solution to this problem, which consists of a dog AI making use of influence mapping, state machines and A* pathfinding to respond intelligently to real-life shepherding commands iss...

Major outputs of the neocortex are conveyed by corticothalamic axons (CTAs), which form reciprocal connections with thalamocortical axons, and corticosubcerebral axons (CSAs) headed to more caudal parts of the nervous system. Previous findings establish that transcriptional programs define cortical neuron identity and suggest that CTAs and thalamic axons may guide each other, but the mechanisms...

What we see is not always what we get. This is the problem when the underlying structure of an interface is hidden from the user's view. Users high in Spatial Visualization Ability (SVA), are quick to learn the contingencies of these relationships and are not hindered by this problem. Low SVA users, however, have difficulty visualizing these contingencies and often get lost. We examined data fo...

Many unsolved problems exists in the field of robot control. This text investigates state of the art methods for path finding, trajectory generation and control in order to identify their properties, which problems they are applicable to, and their weaknesses. This is done by applying them to problems with actual real-world relevance.

In the multi-agent pathfinding problem, groups of agents need to plan paths between their respective start and goal locations in a given environment, usually a two-dimensional map. Existing approaches to this problem include using static or dynamic information to help coordination. However, the resulting behaviour is not always desirable, in that too much information is hand-coded into the prob...

In recent years, real-time strategy (RTS) games have gained interest in the AI research community for their multitude of challenging subproblems — such as collaborative pathfinding, effective resource allocation and unit targeting, to name a few. In this paper we consider the build order problem in RTS games in which we need to find concurrent action sequences that, constrained by unit dependen...