Editorial Introduction to the Special Issue on Embodied Intelligence

We had the great pleasure of organising the first virtual workshop on Embodied Intelligence, held on March 24–26, 2021. After the long struggle of more than a year with the pandemic, all of us were in strong need of interdisciplinary cross-fertilization events, even in a severely limited virtual setting. Even though it was a difficult time to organise anything, we had the luck of attracting over 1,000 registered participants to this event, with more than 100 presentations along with many active debates and discussions. Some of these lectures and debates are available at https://embodied-intelligence.org/. Because of the very successful event, we decided to organise this Special Issue on Embodied Intelligence in the Artificial Life journal to capture some of the discussions and document them in the format of journal publications. For this reason, the authors and reviewers of this special issue were mostly participants of the workshop. We are excited to deliver this issue to reflect the progress and challenges in this research field. The articles included in this special issue are as follows. “Machines that Feel and Think: The Role of Affective Feelings and Mental Action in (Artificial) General Intelligence” by George Deane discusses the roles of feelings, emotions, and moods for understanding biological intelligence and achieving artificial general intelligence. With ongoing research on active inference and self-modelling, the article argues that research in “affective feelings” plays increasingly essential roles to obtain a better understanding of computational phenomenology. “The Enactive and Interactive Dimensions of AI: Ingenuity and Imagination Through the Lens of Art and Music” by Maki Sato and Jonathan McKinney discusses the contributions of embodied and enactive approaches to AI, with a detailed analysis of an aspect of Japanese philosophy in terms of interactivity and contingent dimensions. “Evolving Modularity in Soft Robots Through an Embodied and Self-Organizing Neural Controller” by Federico Pigozzi and Eric Medvet presents research achievements in evolved soft robots. The roles of morphologies and the distributed nature of control architecture were analyzed with respect to the evolution of modularity in various simulated agents. “Braitenberg Vehicles as Developmental Neurosimulation” by Stefan Dvoretskii et al. presents recent progress in research in the developmental approach applied to the neural network of Braitenberg vehicles. Implementation of the basic principles from developmental sciences was shown to lead to the emergence of simple cognitive processes such as feedback, spatial perception, and collective behaviours. “An Embodied Intelligence-Based Biologically Inspired Strategy for Searching a Moving Target” by Julian K. P. Tan et al. reported recent analysis on search behaviours of simulated agents inspired by E. coli. The effect of embodiment was investigated to explain how simple biological systems can take advantage of it for survival.