Glossary
Embodied AI
AI that perceives, reasons about, and acts in the physical world through a body — usually a robot.
Embodied AI is artificial intelligence connected to a body — typically a robot — that has to act in the physical world. The "body" makes everything different: latency matters, mistakes break things, training data is expensive, and the model has to deal with photons and friction, not just text.
The term distinguishes this work from text-only AI (chatbots, code assistants) and pure perception (vision models that look but don't act). An embodied system has a perception → reasoning → action loop and lives or dies by how well that loop closes.
See the introductory guide for the long version.