How It Works
Spatial memory
A stored record of where things are. In people it is the memory that lets you find your way around; in robots and AI agents it is a map or database of places and objects the system has seen, so it can return to them later without searching again.
Origin · no single documented coiner
A long-standing term in psychology and neuroscience; robotics borrowed it. Stanford’s HomeBody project, for example, gives a humanoid “persistent spatial memory.”