Intelligence inspired by living systems
The BioRobotics Laboratory at the University of South Florida studies how biological systems perceive, learn, remember, navigate, and coordinate behavior—and applies those principles to autonomous robots.
Robotic Environment for Autonomous Localization and Mapping
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Important
Enrolled students: all assignments, setup instructions, and course materials live in biorobaw/REALM-Mobile-Robots-Fall26 — start there, not in the repositories below.
Our work connects computational neuroscience and robotics, using robots both as intelligent systems and as experimental tools for understanding biological cognition.
| Research area | Focus |
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| Spatial cognition | Neural representations of place, direction, boundaries, and navigable space |
| Neurorobotics | Embodied models connecting brain physiology, behavior, and autonomous robots |
| Cognitive robotics | Learning, planning, memory, and adaptive behavior |
| Multi-robot systems | Coordination, formations, collaboration, and robot soccer |
| Robot perception | Visual localization, object tracking, SLAM, and environmental sensing |
| Neural simulation | Schema-based computational models and the Neural Simulation Language |
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Research and development resources for visual simultaneous localization and mapping.
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PC-side perception server using an Intel RealSense D435i to detect robots and distribute world-state information.
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Robot-side client for receiving world-state estimates from the HamBot Overhead Perception System.
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Containerized resources for integrating Slamtec lidar hardware with ROS 2.
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Software for developing and evaluating computational models of spatial cognition.
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Research code exploring multi-scale spatial representations and navigation.
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- REALM — Mobile Robots (Fall 2026) — current course repository: Robotic Environment for Autonomous Localization and Mapping.
- RoboBulls — autonomous robot-soccer systems developed at USF.
- CDA4621 MicroMouse — course framework for mapping, planning, and competitive maze navigation.
- FCRAR 2023 MicroMouse — resources for the Florida Conference on Recent Advances in Robotics competition.
- PiBot — documentation for the two-wheel teaching robot used in Control of Mobile Robotics.
- Webots ORB-SLAM — Webots and ORB-SLAM2 integration using ROS 2.
The organization also preserves earlier research systems, experiments, and student projects. These repositories remain available for reproducibility and historical reference:
- FAIRIS-Lite — retired educational framework; current development continues in CJHRobotics/REALM.
- NSL-Java — Java implementation of the Neural Simulation Language.
- Replay-F2019 and OpenReplay-F2021 — spatial-memory and replay models.
- SSLVisionJavaClient — Java client for RoboCup Small Size League vision.
The BioRobotics Laboratory is directed by Prof. Alfredo Weitzenfeld in the USF Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing.
Research interests include biologically inspired robotics, computational neuroscience, spatial cognition, cognitive robotics, human–robot interaction, and multi-robot systems.
We welcome inquiries from students interested in spatial cognition, neurorobotics, autonomous systems, computational neuroscience, and multi-robot research.
University of South Florida · Tampa, Florida, USA
