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

[Yahma]

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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