Embodied AI
Artificial intelligence that perceives and acts through a physical body, such as a robot, in a continuous loop of sensing, deciding and moving.
Photo: Igor Omilaev / Unsplash
A chatbot reads text and writes text, and a wrong answer is a wrong paragraph. An embodied AI system takes in camera images, depth, touch and joint positions, chooses an action, moves its motors, then senses the result and starts again, many times per second. Its mistakes happen in the physical world, where a dropped glass cannot be undone.
That loop shapes the engineering. Readings from different sensors have to be combined through sensor fusion, each decision has to arrive in time for the next movement, and a dropped network connection must not freeze a robot mid-step, which pushes much of the computing onto the machine itself as edge AI. Many recent robot models are vision-language-action models. Edge AI explained covers the onboard hardware.
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