Plant Intelligence for Robotics and AI
Abstract
Plants are intelligent insofar as they behave adaptively, flexibly, anticipatorily, and in a goal-directed manner. Plausibly, to do so, self-propelled mobility is needed. Contrary to common belief, plants are not merely acted upon. Plants do not passively build photosynthate; they rather take action autonomously according to their own needs. This allows them to act purposefully in the face of contingencies. Avoiding zoocentric biases represents an advantage. Too close attention to neural intracranial happenings risks missing what is truly at stake in the study of intelligence, be it biological or artificial. Being rooted, plants need to be much more distributed and decentralized than animals. Also, unlike animal locomotion, plant movement takes the form of growth and development. However, the default understanding in the biological and cognitive sciences of the relation between mobility and cognition is by resorting to an information-processing paradigm: If plants cognize it must be due to the fact that they are able to sense and map out their surroundings courtesy of computational and algorithmic resources. By contrast,our project aims to explore plant intelligence (e.g., the presence of offline behavior, the perception of affordances, memory and learning, problem solving and decision-making, and endogenous control) from the combined noncomputational approach of neoGibsonian ecological psychology and embodied cognitive science. Many aspects of cognition have more to do with the type of body one has—its bodily constitution in terms of sensors and effectors, materials, morphology, and the like—, and with the way one ecologically interacts (couples) with its local surroundings, rather than with inferential capacities. The approach to the study of plant signaling and behavior herewith presented can furnish us with brand new sources of bioinspiration for robotics and AI.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jan 23, 2019
- Source ID
- N629091912015
Entities
People
- Francisco Calvo Garzon
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of Murcia