Intelligence Without a Brain – Soft Robotics
Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Robotics Oliver Brock About the Fine-Tuned Interplay Between Brain, Body, and Environment
Poster Online Lecture Series »Talking Matters«, Copyright: Lucius Fekonja, Bastian Beyer, Iva Rešetar, adapted by NODE Berlin
On Tuesday, 23rd November 2021, Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Robotics and Director of the Cluster of Excellence »Science of Intelligence« Oliver Brock was guest at our lecture series »Talking Matters«. In his talk entitled »Intelligence Without a Brain – Soft Robotics«, he argued that intelligent behavior requires the fine-tuned interplay between brain, body, and environment, a central aspect that AI research has stubbornly ignored for the last 60 years.
The lecture was given in English. It was part of the online lecture series of the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity« entitled »Talking Matters«.
Abstract
The robotics community has recently (re-)discovered the body’s contribution to intelligence. Not that they were not aware of it… after all, robots (as well as all intelligent agents) have a body! In spite of this, the design of robots’ bodies and the use of the body for generating behavior were for the most part entirely decoupled. Only recently, a sub-field of robotics, called soft robotics, has flourished tremendously by overcoming this division, producing robots that exhibit new levels of robustness and functional versatility. I will present examples of this from our research, illustrating how the body fundamentally contributes to intelligent behavior. I will also show examples of how leveraging the body in »un-natural« ways can lead to surprising novel capabilities (like hearing forces). I will then go one step further and argue that in addition to brain and body also the environment plays an important role in generating intelligent behavior. The underlying hypothesis is that intelligent behavior requires the fine-tuned interplay between brain, body, and environment. This may appear entirely obvious, but AI research has stubbornly ignored this for the last 60 years.
Bio
Oliver Brock is the Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Robotics in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Technische Universität Berlin, a German »University of Excellence«. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2000 and held postdoctoral positions at Rice University and Stanford University. He was an Assistant and Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst before moving back to Berlin in 2009. The research of Brock's lab, the Robotics and Biology Laboratory, focuses on robot intelligence, mobile manipulation, interactive perception, grasping, manipulation, soft material robotics, interactive machine learning, deep learning, motion generation, and the application of algorithms and concepts from robotics to computational problems in structural molecular biology. Oliver Brock directs the Research Center of Excellence »Science of Intelligence«. He is an IEEE Fellow and was president of the Robotics: Science and Systems Foundation from 2012 until 2019.