The iRat maintains place stability without vision.

<p>(A) Performance of the iRat in a 1 m square arena using a particle filter approximation of the positional uncertainty distribution (black line), compared with pure odometry (red line). Periods where at least one laser whisker registers a distance below 30 cm are shown (cyan bars). The total trajectory time was approximately 5 minutes (1,500 time steps). (B) The error between estimated heading and actual heading. (C) The error between the estimated position and actual position. (D) The ground truth trajectory (blue) is shown following every 375 time steps during a 1,500 time step iRat trial (dashed lines in A to C). The estimated position and orientation from pure odometry (red) is consistently inferior to using arena information (black) via a particle filter (gray dots). See <a href="http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002651#s2" target="_blank">Methods</a> for details of the iRat.