Investigating the Mechanisms of Embodied Intelligence with Evolvable Modular Soft Robots

Abstract # ↰

Recent scientific and technological progresses in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) resulted in the availability of tools able to assist humans in increasingly sophisticated tasks, as, e.g., summarizing a textual information captured by photo of a document upon a spoken request. The capabilities of these tools are making the boundary between task-specific and general AI progressively fuzzier: apparently, we are hence approaching the so called artificial general intelligence (AGI). However, despite their complexity, these tasks very often deal only with abstract information, i.e., there is no direct interaction with the physical world. We argue that an alternative path to AGI can be found by considering those tasks where an agent is immersed in, and has to interact with, an environment, i.e., those where intelligence is embodied. In this brief survey, we review some recent research works where we used evolved modular soft robots as a mean for investigating the conditions for the arising of embodied intelligence. Modularity and softness constitute an opportunity for intelligence to be distributed and supported by the body in dealing with environment changes. Evolution is the way the agents can adapt to the environment. We discuss several experiments that we designed to answer specific research questions.