Embodiment and the Emergence of Intelligence: From Embodied Cognitive Science to Soft Robotics

In the field of embodied cognitive science, the frame-of-reference problem refers to the discrepancy between an agent’s observed behavior (i.e., its externally visible movements) and its internal representations. This issue is illustrated in Rolf Pfeifer’s book How the Body Shapes the Way We Think using the example of the “Swiss Robot.” The Swiss Robot is a type of Braitenberg vehicle equipped with two infrared sensors at its front. The internal representation is a simple network that directly connects the infrared sensors to the motors, enabling obstacle avoidance. Despite this simplicity, the robot appears to exhibit a “tidying-up” behavior—gathering and arranging Styrofoam cubes—due to its well-designed morphology and environmental conditions. This emergent behavior arises from the interaction between the agent’s body design, particularly the arrangement of its infrared sensors, and the environment, the size of the object, the size of the arena, and the number of the agents in the arena. The tidying-up behavior is not explicitly programmed but emerges through the interaction between the robot’s physical embodiment and the environment.