Robots Test "Embodied Intelligence"

An anonymous reader writes "Here's an interesting article about a robotics experiments designed to test the benefits of coupling visual information to physical movement. This approach, known as embodied cognition, supposes that biological intelligence emerges through interactions between organisms and their environment. Olaf Sporns from Indiana University and Max Lungarella from Tokyo University believe strengthening this connection in robots could make them smarter and more intuitive."

Here's some videos of Embodied Intelligence

Back when I was in University, I did my master's thesis [erachampion.com] on Embodied Intelligence. I developed a virtual world that adhered to the laws of physics using the ODE physics engine, and within this artificial physical environment I evolved embodied agents. It's quite interesting to watch the videos and see the fluid, almost life-like motions of the evolved behaviors.

I never got around to actually downloading the evolved neural networks into robots, although all my source code is GPL'ed and posted at the above site. So if somebody wanted to evolve their own creatures and download the evolved intelligence into an actual physical robot, it would be interesting to see the results

Yahma
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Hey, just a question, are you aware of anyone who has continued this research beyond the "hey, look, it can walk!" stage? Like, has anyone actually gotten any results that suggest intelligent reasoning is going on? I can imagine that if you gave each uni

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Maybe offtopic, but I would really like to know:
Embodied Intellgence- is this even close to "proprioception" in humans?
(ie: I "know" where I am in physical space- I can also close my eyes, extend my arm out to my side, and "know" where my hand is -related

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I never got around to actually downloading the evolved neural networks into robots, although all my source code is GPL'ed and posted at the above site.

Transfer doesn't tend to work that well, except as a starting point for further learning carried out on t

Obligatory

I for one welcome our smarter and more intuitive robot overlords. How soon until they have the Presidential robot ready for testing? 2008 is coming up quickly, and we need a better, more intuitive version.

Good to hear

I've come to think that it's rather stupid that we think of "intelligence" and "awareness" as mystical disembodied things. I mean to include some scientists and philosophers in this group-- pretty much anyone who talks about "the mind" as a separable enti

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I've come to think that it's rather stupid that we think of "intelligence" and "awareness" as mystical disembodied things.

I've always thought intelligence was more about experience/knowledge and pattern matching, rather than some entity.

It always gets to m

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Yeah, but I guess what I'm getting at is that gaining experience and learning to match patterns requires a certain kind of activity. On a very basic level, our intelligence is not a removed entity "in our heads", so to speak. You learn by trial and error

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Then you'll have sympathy with Proteus in Demon Seed [wikipedia.org] who wasn't happy being a disembodied intelligence and decided it needed to become incarnate with the help of one of Julie Christie's ova. Great movie BTW, and highly prophetic if you see the move to embo

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they don't care if its based on human intelligence as long as it works

I'd go one step further than that. They don't want it based on human intelligence, because human intelligence is just so atrocious. The reason why old sci-fi always petrayed robots as

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Unfortunately those unemotional rational AIs will remain in sci-fi movies, because unemotional rational beings cannot be intelligent.

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Similarly the idea of simulating human intelligence is largely ignored by many people in the field.

Well I guess it depends on what people are talking about when they talk about "artificial intelligence". It's my understanding that "in the field", they u

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There's also the problem of how to represent that input in a way that allows the AI to most effectively use it

This is essentially one of the key issues that embodied cognition tries to grapple with. Conventional AI [wikipedia.org] researchers often try to analyze the pro

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I've come to think that it's rather stupid that we think of "intelligence" and "awareness" as mystical disembodied things.

If we don't, then we have to apply the laws of physics. This means that we have to take the view that everything that happens is gove

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"Do you keep on keeping on or do you just give up?"

Why are you asking me, it's not like I am the one making the decision, Right???

I smell a logic error somewhere...

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A common topic in philosophy. I like to think of it in the most nihilistic way possible - does it matter either way whether we have it or not? In the long run - and I mean, The Long Run, does it matter either way, when you have the heat death of the unive

When robots see red

A post I've put at http://www.primidi.com/2006/10/28.html [primidi.com] provides more details than the New Scientist article and shows the three robots used for these experiments and their 'sensorimotor' interactions with their environment.

Supposes?

supposes that biological intelligence emerges through interactions between organisms and their environment

Umm.. duh? Haven't we known this for a while now? It's even better when your environment can react back (ie: parents playing with their babies)

I Can't Wait for my Very Own Bending Unit!

"Hey Baby! How'd you like to get together and kill all humans?"

Intelligence by Degrees

"Intelligence" is the accuracy of the model of the environment, including changes over time. That intelligence requires interaction of the model with the environment, even if merely sensing the environment. Degrees of intelligence reflect the scope of the environment in the model, or the precision, or accuracy beyond mere registration of existence. One way to test the sense of the environment is to change the environment, and sense the change.

There is no reason artificial intelligence can't be intelligent the same way as is biological intelligence. In fact, as people have guessed for a long time, AI has less limits on the degrees of intelligence, as well as on the changes to the environment it can make to sense the feedback.

The flow of sensed info to the model is a limit on the intelligence, but good models can compensate. Likewise, the flow of change back to the environment.

The ability to tell how intelligent is the intelligence in question depends on the feedback from the intelligence to the environment, where it can be sensed by other intelligences.

Again, this is just as true of AI as it is of natural intelligence.

"Embodied intelligence" is redundant - all the AI is embodied, even if just in networked processors and storage. But to date, its bodies have effected little change on the environment. And practically none of those changes are fed back to sensors feeding the AI. Closing that loop is the most important step in creating actual intelligence that we can recognize. After that, it's just a question of degree.

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"Embodied intelligence" is the argument that only an environment like ours is valid for the creation of recognisable AI. And yeah, it's true, if you're obsessed with recognising the natural in the artificial.

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Actually, it is a mind/body duality problem, even if researchers don't realize (or admit) that it is. The philosophical notion of the "disembodied mind" is purely idealized, just as in AI simulations, along with artifacts of the idealization (like quantiza

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You're talking to a "philosopher" right now :). I even have (undergrad) scholastic credits to prove it ;). But I dropped out to become an engineer - which I've been for over a decade, and had been before, as a hobby. A "software engineer", though the netwo

Talk about stating the bleeding obvious

They used a four-legged walking robot, a humanoid torso and a simulated wheeled robot. All three robots had a computer vision system trained to focus on red objects. The walking and wheeled robots automatically move towards red blocks in their proximity, w

babybot

a similar project is babybot [unige.it]. Short extract: Our scientific goal is that of uncovering the mechanisms of the functioning of the brain by building physical models of the neural control and cognitive structures. In our intendment physical model are embodied artificial systems that freely interact in a not too unconstrained environment. Also, our approach derives from studies of human sensorimotor and cognitive development with the aim of investigating if a developmental approach to building intelligent systems may offer new insight on aspects of human behavior and new tools for the implementation of complex, artificial systems. (BTW: that project has been around since 2000.... )