Embodied Intelligence & Morphological Computation in Soft Robotics Community: Collaborations, Coordination, and Perspective

The agile nature of physical interactions in animal and plant species has inspired many recent advances in robotics and their control frameworks. However, they still face challenges in interaction with ever-changing unconstructured world that we live in. Intelligence is one of nature's survival solutions for biological creatures to adapt to and reshape their surroundings. Our robots are no different in these remits. An important key to their survival and effectiveness in the natural world is the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this chapter we provide a brief overview of the rapidly emerging Soft Robotics research community around AI relevant concepts such as Embodied intelligence and Morphological Computation. More specifically, we focused on the importance of setting such "community goals" to create a diverse interdisciplinary research environment, an enormously important element to keep up with our rapidly progressing world. To this end, we focused on the collaborations withing and between the communities, impacts of the recently established IEEE Soft Robotics Technical Committee on coordinating these efforts, and most important of all, the key ideas and perspectives based on 200 interviews with researchers across different fields.