Researchers Propose 'Physical AI' As Key To Lifelike Robots

Researchers from Imperial College London and the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science ... [ ] and Technology have proposed the combined discipline of "Physical AI" as a means for developing lifelike autonomous robots. Researchers at Imperial College London have proposed "physical artificial intelligence" as a new multidisciplinary area of research that could be vital to producing lifelike intelligent robots in the future. Writing in the Nature Machine Intelligence journal, the team argue that teaching materials science, mechanical engineering, computer science, biology and chemistry as a combined discipline would help students and researchers develop lifelike artificially intelligent robots. This combined discipline of "physical AI" could effectively be the missing link in the attempt to create artificially intelligent robots that look and behave like humans, the Imperial College London team suggests. They argue that research into how to build lifelike robot bodies has failed to keep up with advances in computational artificial intelligence, and that the study and practice of physical artificial intelligence could rectify this imbalance.