The concept of intelligence is expanding beyond neural systems to include plants. Following this trend, we turn our focus on a key but undeveloped branch—plant embodied intelligence (PEI), where adaptive problem-solving activities emerge from dynamic interactions between distributed plant structures and their environment. Specifically, this review first outlines PEI's theoretical foundations and then proposes research avenues, including adaptive morphogenesis and growth, distributed information processing and memory, ecological communication and swarm-like behavior, and decision-making under risk and competition. Next, a comprehensive analysis of global research highlights pioneering work, spanning plant neurobiology, systems biology, and bio-inspired materials, while identifying critical gaps. Accordingly, a convergent methodology of quantitative phenotyping, molecular systems biology, ecological modeling, and plant-inspired robotics/software. Finally, we articulate how the pursuit of PEI can reciprocally advance both plant sciences and intelligent systems sciences, ultimately positioning plants as active collaborators for sustainable innovation.
Yuxin Lin (Tue,) studied this question.
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