Starre Julia Vartan

I really did a lot of deep thinking both pitching and writing this piece for New Atlas, where I was given a wide remit in how to cover this topic by editor Rich Haridy. I talked to Chinese soft robotics experts, AI researchers, and one of the pioneers of robotics, Cecilia Laschi (quoted below), and we had an incredible in-depth conversation about embodied intelligence. It’s these kinds of conversations that are why I love my work.

“If you have a human robot walking you control all different movements,” she says in an interview with New Atlas. “If there is something different on the terrain, you have to reprogram a little bit.”

But animals don’t need to re-think and plan out their walking motions. “Our knee is compliant,” she explains. “We compensate for uneven ground mechanically, without using the brain.” This is embodied intelligence – the idea that some elements of cognition can be outsourced to the body.

Embodied intelligence has clear advantages from an engineering perspective; offloading perception, control, and decision-making to a robot’s physical structure means reduced computational demands in the main robot brain, leading to machines that can function more effectively in unpredictable environments.

In a May special issue of Science Robotics, Laschi defines it like this: “Motor control is not entirely managed by the computing system … motor behavior is partially shaped mechanically by external forces acting on the body.” Behavior is shaped by environment, and intelligence is learned through experience, not pre-programmed into software.

Thinking in this way, intelligence isn’t just about faster chips or bigger models – it’s about interaction. Key to advancing this intelligence is the field of soft robotics, which uses materials like silicone or special fabrics to enable more flexible robot bodies. These bodies are adaptive, fluid, and capable of real-time learning. A soft robotic arm, like an octopus tentacle, can grasp, explore, and respond without needing to calculate every move.