Going Places: Place Recognition in Artificial and Natural Systems

Place recognition--the process of an animal, person or robot recognizing a familiar location in the world--has attracted significant attention across multiple disciplines. In animals, this capability has evolved over millions of years through sophisticated neural mechanisms: hippocampal place cells fire at specific spatial locations (1), entorhinal grid cells provide spatial coordinates through hexagonal firing patterns (2), while diverse species demonstrate remarkable navigation--from desert ants using celestial cues and visual panoramas (3) to migratory birds returning to precise breeding sites across hemispheric distances (4). Humans extend these biological foundations with unique cognitive abilities, recognizing places not only through sensory perception but also through semantic meaning, emotional associations, and cultural context--enabling us to identify familiar locations from descriptions, memories, or even fictional narratives (5). In artificial systems, place recognition underpins core robotics functions such as localization, mapping, and long-term autonomy, developing into a mature field that, while sometimes inspired by biological principles, often diverges significantly in implementation to optimize for computational efficiency and metric accuracy. As research has grown in the area, so too has a rich landscape of surveys and reviews that reflect the field's evolution and diversification.