Abstract
Embodied intelligence is the computational approach to the design and understanding of intelligent behavior in embodied and situated agents through the consideration of the strict coupling between the agent and its environment (situatedness), mediated by the constraints of the agent’s own body, perceptual and motor system, and brain (embodiment). The emergence of the field of embodied intelligence is closely linked to parallel developments in computational intelligence and robotics, where the focus is on morphological computation and sensory–motor coordination in evolutionary robotics models, and in neuroscience and cognitive sciences where the focus is on embodied cognition and developmental robotics models of embodied symbol learning. This chapter provides a theoretical and technical overview of some principles of embodied intelligence, namely morphological computation, sensory–motor coordination, and developmental embodied cognition. It will also discuss some tutorial examples on the modeling of body/brain/environment adaptation for the evolution of morphological computational agents, evolutionary robotics model of navigation and object discrimination, and developmental robotics models of language and numerical cognition in humanoid robots.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Abbreviations
- ACP:
-
active categorical perception
- DOF:
-
degree of freedom
- EC:
-
embodied cognition
- OM:
-
operational momentum
- RGB:
-
red-green-blue
- RT:
-
reaction time
- SNARC:
-
spatial–numerical association of response code
- SOM:
-
self-organizing map
References
R.D. Beer: A dynamical systems perspective on agent-environment interaction, Artif. Intell. 72, 173–215 (1995)
R.A. Brooks: Elephants don't play chess, Robot. Auton. Syst. 6(1), 3–15 (1990)
A. Cangelosi: Grounding language in action and perception: From cognitive agents to humanoid robots, Phys. Life Rev. 7(2), 139–151 (2010)
H.J. Chiel, R.D. Beer: The brain has a body: Adaptive behavior emerges from interactions of nervous system, body and environment, Trends Neurosci. 20, 553–557 (1997)
F. Keijzer: Representation and Behavior (MIT Press, London 2001)
S. Nolfi, D. Floreano: Evolutionary Robotics: The Biology, Intelligence, and Technology of Self-Organizing Machines (MIT/Bradford Books, Cambridge 2000)
R. Pfeifer, J.C. Bongard: How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence (MIT Press, Cambridge 2006)
C. Paul: Morphology and computation, Proc. Int. Conf. Simul. Adapt. Behav. (2004) pp. 33–38
C. Paul: Morphological computation: A basis for the analysis of morphology and control requirements, Robot. Auton. Syst. 54(8), 619–630 (2006)
R. Pfeifer, F. Iida: Morphological computation: Connecting body, brain and environment, Jpn. Sci. Mon. 58(2), 48–54 (2005)
G. Pezzulo, L.W. Barsalou, A. Cangelosi, M.H. Fischer, K. McRae, M.J. Spivey: The mechanics of embodiment: A dialog on embodiment and computational modeling, Front. Psychol. 2(5), 1–21 (2011)
D. Pecher, R.A. Zwaan (Eds.): Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge 2005)
M. Wilson: Six views of embodied cognition, Psychon. Bull. Rev. 9, 625–636 (2002)
L. Meteyard, S.R. Cuadrado, B. Bahrami, G. Vigliocco: Coming of age: A review of embodiment and the neuroscience of semantics, Cortex 48(7), 788–804 (2012)
R. Shepard, J. Metzler: Mental rotation of three dimensional objects, Science 171(972), 701–703 (1972)
K. Dijkstra, M.P. Kaschak, R.A. Zwaan: Body posture facilitiates the retrieval of autobiographical memories, Cognition 102, 139–149 (2007)
L.E. Williams, J.A. Bargh: Keeping one's distance: The influence of spatial distance cues on affect and evaluation, Psychol. Sci. 19, 302–308 (2008)
A. Cangelosi, M. Schlesinger: Developmental Robotics: From Babies to Robots (MIT Press, Cambridge 2012)
J. Bongard: The utility of evolving simulated robot morphology increases with task complexity for object manipulation, Artif. Life 16(3), 201–223 (2010)
E. Tuci, G. Massera, S. Nolfi: Active categorical perception of object shapes in a simulated anthropomorphic robotic arm, IEEE Trans. Evol. Comput. 14(6), 885–899 (2010)
R. Pfeifer, G. Gomez: Morphological computation – Connecting brain, body, and environment, Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 5436, 66–83 (2009)
V. Pavlov, A. Timofeyev: Construction and stabilization of programmed movements of a mobile robot-manipulator, Eng. Cybern. 14(6), 70–79 (1976)
S. Hirose, Y. Umetani: The development of soft gripper for the versatile robot hand, Mech. Mach. Theor. 13(3), 351–359 (1978)
E. Brown, N. Rodenberg, J. Amend, A. Mozeika, E. Steltz, M.R. Zakin, H. Lipson, H.M. Jaeger: Universal robotic gripper based on the jamming of granular material, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 107(44), 18809–18814 (2010)
T.J. Allen, R.D. Quinn, R.J. Bachmann, R.E. Ritzmann: Abstracted biological principles applied with reduced actuation improve mobility of legged vehicles, Proc. IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. Intell. Robot. Syst. 2 (2003) pp. 1370–1375
M. Wisse, G. Feliksdal, J. Van Frankkenhuyzen, B. Moyer: Passive-based walking robot, IEEE Robot. Autom. Mag. 14(2), 52–62 (2007)
K. Sims: Evolving 3d morphology and behavior by competition, Artif. Life 1(4), 353–372 (1994)
J.E. Auerbach, J.C. Bongard: On the relationship between environmental and morphological complexity in evolved robots, Proc. 14th Int. Conf. Genet. Evol. Comput. (2012) pp. 521–528
GECCO 2012 Robot Videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD5943A95ABC2C0B3
J.E. Auerbach, J.C. Bongard: On the relationship between environmental and mechanical complexity in evolved robots, Proc. 13th Int. Conf. Simul. Synth. Living Syst. (2012) pp. 309–316
F. Mondada, E. Franzi, P. Ienne: Mobile robot miniaturisation: A tool for investigation in control algorithms, Proc. 3rd Int. Symp. Exp. Robot. (Kyoto, Japan 1993)
S. Nolfi: Power and limits of reactive agents, Neurocomputing 49, 119–145 (2002)
C. Scheier, R. Pfeifer, Y. Kunyioshi: Embedded neural networks: Exploiting constraints, Neural Netw. 11, 1551–1596 (1998)
S. Nolfi: Categories formation in self-organizing embodied agents. In: Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science, ed. by H. Cohen, C. Lefebvre (Elsevier, Amsterdam 2005) pp. 869–889
J.J. Gibson: The Perception of the Visual World (Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1950)
N. Franceschini, F. Ruffier, J. Serres, S. Viollet: Optic flow based visual guidance: From flying insects to miniature aerial vehicles. In: Aerial Vehicles, ed. by T.M. Lam (InTech, Rijeka 2009)
S. Nolfi, D. Marocco: Active perception: A sensorimotor account of object categorization. In: From Animals to Animats 7, (MIT Press, Cambridge 2002) pp. 266–271
D. Floreano, T. Kato, D. Marocco, S. Sauser: Coevolution of active vision and feature selection, Biol. Cybern. 90(3), 218–228 (2004)
H.A. Ruff: Infants' manipulative exploration of objects: Effect of age and object characteristics, Dev. Psychol. 20, 9–20 (1984)
R. Bajcsy: Active perception, Proc. IEEE 76(8), 996–1005 (1988)
D.H. Ballard: Animate vision, Artif. Intell. 48, 57–86 (1991)
J. De Greef, S. Nolfi: Evolution of implicit and explicit communication in a group of mobile robots. In: Evolution of Communication and Language in Embodied Agents, ed. by S. Nolfi, M. Mirolli (Springer, Berlin 2010)
J.L. Elman, E.A. Bates, M. Johnson, A. Karmiloff-Smith, D. Parisi, K. Plunkett: Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development (MIT Press, Cambridge 1996)
S. Nolfi, D. Floreano: Learning and evolution, auton, Robots 7(1), 89–113 (1999)
N. Bernstein: The Coordination and Regulation of Movements (Pergamon, Oxford 1967)
P. Savastano, S. Nolfi: Incremental learning in a 14 DOF simulated iCub robot: Modelling infant reach/grasp development, Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 7375, 369–370 (2012)
A.M. Collins, M.R. Quillian: Retrieval time from semantic memory, J. Verb. Learn. Verb. Behav. 8, 240–247 (1969)
E. Rosch: Cognitive representations of semantic categories, J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 104, 192–233 (1975)
D.E. Rumelhart, J.L. McClelland, P.D.P. Group: Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the microstructure of Cognition (MIT Press, Cambridge 1986)
S. Harnad: The symbol grounding problem, Physica D 42, 335–346 (1990)
L.W. Barsalou: Grounded cognition, Annu. Rev. Psychol. 59, 617–645 (2008)
M. Asada, K. Hosoda, Y. Kuniyoshi, H. Ishiguro, T. Inui, Y. Yoshikawa, M. Ogino, C. Yoshida: Cognitive developmental robotics: A survey, IEEE Trans. Auton. Mental Dev. 1, 12–34 (2009)
M. Lungarella, G. Metta, R. Pfeifer, G. Sandini: Developmental robotics: A survey, Connect Sci. 15(4), 151–190 (2003)
P.Y. Oudeyer: Developmental robotics. In: Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning, Springer References Series, ed. by N.M. Seel (Springer, New York 2012) p. 329
A. Glenberg, K. Kaschak: Grounding language in action, Psychon. Bull. Rev. 9(3), 558–565 (2002)
M.H. Fischer, R.A. Zwaan: Embodied language – A review of the role of the motor system in language comprehension, Q. J. Exp. Psychol. 61(6), 825–850 (2008)
F. Pulvermüller: The Neuroscience of Language (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge 2003)
S.F. Cappa, D. Perani: The neural correlates of noun and verb processing, J. Neurolinguist. 16(2/3), 183–189 (2003)
O. Hauk, I. Johnsrude, F. Pulvermüller: Somatotopic representation of action words in human motor and premotor cortex, Neuron 41(2), 301–330 (2004)
M. Tomasello: Constructing a Language (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge 2003)
L.B. Smith, L. Samuelson: Objects in space and mind: From reaching to words. In: Thinking Through Space: Spatial Foundations of Language and Cognition, ed. by K. Mix, L.B. Smith, M. Gasser (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford 2010)
A.F. Morse, T. Belpaeme, A. Cangelosi, L.B. Smith: Thinking with your body: Modelling spatial biases in categorization using a real humanoid robot, 2010 Annu. Meet. Cogn. Sci. Soc. (2010) pp. 33–38
G. Metta, L. Natale, F. Nori, G. Sandini, D. Vernon, L. Fadiga, C. von Hofsten, J. Santos-Victor, A. Bernardino, L. Montesano: The iCub humanoid robot: An open-systems platform for research in cognitive development, Neural Netw. 23, 1125–1134 (2010)
A.F. Morse, J. de Greeff, T. Belpaeme, A. Cangelosi: Epigenetic robotics architecture (ERA), IEEE Trans. Auton. Mental Dev. 2(4), 325–339 (2010)
Y. Sugita, J. Tani: Learning semantic combinatoriality from the interaction between linguistic and behavioral processes, Adapt. Behav. 13(1), 33–52 (2005)
V. Tikhanoff, A. Cangelosi, G. Metta: Language understanding in humanoid robots: iCub simulation experiments, IEEE Trans. Auton. Mental Dev. 3(1), 17–29 (2011)
E. Tuci, T. Ferrauto, A. Zeschel, G. Massera, S. Nolfi: An experiment on behavior generalization and the emergence of linguistic compositionality in evolving robots, IEEE Trans. Auton. Mental Dev. 3(2), 176–189 (2011)
Y. Yamashita, J. Tani: Emergence of functional hierarchy in a multiple timescale neural network model: A humanoid robot experiment, PLoS Comput. Biol. 4(11), e1000220 (2008)
L. Steels: Modeling the cultural evolution of language, Phys. Life Rev. 8(4), 339–356 (2011)
L. Steels: Experiments in Cultural Language Evolution, Advances in Interaction Studies, Vol. 3 (John Benjamins, Amsterdam 2012)
F. Stramandinoli, D. Marocco, A. Cangelosi: The grounding of higher order concepts in action and language: A cognitive robotics model, Neural Netw. 32, 165–173 (2012)
J. Piaget: The Origins of Intelligence in Children (International Univ. Press, New York 1952)
G.J. Groen, J.M. Parkman: A chronometric analysis of simple addition, Psychol. Rev. 79(4), 329–343 (1972)
R.S. Moyer, T.K. Landauer: Time required for judgements of numerical inequality, Nature 215, 1519–1520 (1967)
M. Rucinski, A. Cangelosi, T. Belpaeme: An embodied developmental robotic model of interactions between numbers and space, Expanding the Space of Cognitive Science, 23rd Annu. Meet. Cogn. Sci. Soc., ed. by L. Carlson, C. Hoelscher, T.F. Shipley (Cognitive Science Society, Austin 2011) pp. 237–242
S. Dehaene, S. Bossini, P. Giraux: The mental representation of parity and number magnitude, J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 122, 371–396 (1993)
G. Wood, H.C. Nuerk, K. Willmes, M.H. Fischer: On the cognitive link between space and number: A meta-analysis of the SNARC effect, Psychol. Sci. Q. 50(4), 489–525 (2008)
M.H. Fischer, A.D. Castel, M.D. Dodd, J. Pratt: Perceiving numbers causes spatial shifts of attention, Nat. Neurosci. 6(6), 555–556 (2003)
D.B. Berch, E.J. Foley, R. Hill, R.P. McDonough: Extracting parity and magnitude from Arabic numerals: Developmental changes in number processing and mental representation, J. Exp. Child Psychol. 74, 286–308 (1999)
M.H. Fischer: Finger counting habits modulate spatial-numerical associations, Cortex 44, 386–392 (2008)
S.M. Göbel, S. Shaki, M.H. Fischer: The cultural number line: A review of cultural and linguistic influences on the development of number processing, J. Cross-Cult. Psychol. 42, 543–565 (2011)
S. Shaki, M.H. Fischer: Reading space into numbers – A cross-linguistic comparison of the SNARC effect, Cognition 108, 590–599 (2008)
S. Shaki, M.H. Fischer, W.M. Petrusic: Reading habits for both words and numbers contribute to the SNARC effect, Psychon. Bull. Rev. 16(2), 328–331 (2009)
M.H. Fischer, R. Mills, S. Shaki: How to cook a SNARC: Number placement in text rapidly changes spatial-numerical associations, Brain Cogn. 72, 333–336 (2010)
M.H. Fischer, P. Brugger: When digits help digits: Spatial-numerical associations point to finger counting as prime example of embodied cognition, Front. Psychol. 2, 260 (2011)
M. Pinhas, M.H. Fischer: Mental movements without magnitude? A study of spatial biases in symbolic arithmetic, Cognition 109, 408–415 (2008)
M. Rucinski, A. Cangelosi, T. Belpaeme: Robotic model of the contribution of gesture to learning to count, Proc. IEEE ICDL-EpiRob Conf. Dev. (2012)
Q. Chen, T. Verguts: Beyond the mental number line: A neural network model of number-space interactions, Cogn. Psychol. 60(3), 218–240 (2010)
D. Caligiore, A.M. Borghi, D. Parisi, G. Baldassarre: TRoPICALS: A computational embodied neuroscience model of compatibility effects, Psychol. Rev. 117, 1188–1228 (2010)
D. Caligiore, A.M. Borghi, R. Ellis, A. Cangelosi, G. Baldassarre: How affordances associated with a distractor object can cause compatibility effects: A study with the computational model TRoPICALS, Psychol. Res. 77(1), 7–19 (2013)
O. Lindemann, A. Alipour, M.H. Fischer: Finger counting habits in Middle-Eastern and Western individuals: An online survey, J. Cross-Cult. Psychol. 42, 566–578 (2011)
M.W. Alibali, A.A. DiRusso: The function of gesture in learning to count: More than keeping track, Cogn. Dev. 14(1), 37–56 (1999)
R. Pfeifer, M. Lungarella, F. Iida: The challenges ahead for bio-inspired `soft' robotics, Commun. ACM 55(11), 76–87 (2012)
M. Lungarella, O. Sporns: Information self-structuring: Key principle for learning and development, Proc. 4th Int. Conf. Dev. Learn. (2005)
P. Capdepuy, D. Polani, C. Nehaniv: Maximization of potential information flow as a universal utility for collective behaviour, Proc. 2007 IEEE Symp. Artif. Life (CI-ALife 2007) (2007) pp. 207–213
L. Gleitman: The structural sources of verb meanings, Lang. Acquis. 1, 135–176 (1990)
J. Mayor, K. Plunkett: Vocabulary explosion: Are infants full of Zipf?, Proc. 32nd Annu. Meet. Cogn. Sci. Soc., ed. by S. Ohlsson, R. Catrambone (Cognitive Science Society, Austin 2010)
E. Thelen, L.B. Smith: A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action (MIT Press, Cambridge 1994)
M.L. McKinney, K.J. McNamara: Heterochrony, the Evolution of Ontogeny (Plenum, New York 1991)
A. Cangelosi: Heterochrony and adaptation in developing neural networks, Proc. GECCO99 Genet. Evol. Comput. Conf., ed. by W. Banzhaf (Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco 1999) pp. 1241–1248
G.C. Hinton, S.J. Nowlan: How learning can guide evolution, Complex Syst. 1, 495–502 (1987)
S. Nolfi, J.L. Elman, D. Parisi: Learning and evolution in neural networks, Adapt. Behav. 3(1), 5–28 (1994)
J. Bongard: Morphological change in machines accelerates the evolution of robust behavior, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 108(4), 1234–1239 (2011)
S. Kumar, P. Bentley (Eds.): On Growth, Form, and Computers (Academic, London 2003)
K.O. Stanley, R. Miikkulainen: A taxonomy for artifcial embryogeny, Artif. Life 9, 93–130 (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cangelosi, A., Bongard, J., Fischer, M.H., Nolfi, S. (2015). Embodied Intelligence. In: Kacprzyk, J., Pedrycz, W. (eds) Springer Handbook of Computational Intelligence. Springer Handbooks. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43505-2_37
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43505-2_37
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-662-43504-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-662-43505-2
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)