On the Timescales of Embodied Intelligence for Autonomous Adaptive Systems

Embodiment is a crucial concept for the autonomy and adaptivity of systems working in the physical world with high degrees of uncertainty and complexity. The physical bodies of autonomous adaptive systems heavily influence the information flow from the environment to the central processing (and vice versa), requiring us to consider the full triad of brain, body, and environment to investigate intelligent behavior. This article provides a structured review of embodied intelligence with a special emphasis on the concept of timescales and their role in self-organization and the emergence of complex behavior. We classify embodied interactions into three types—cross-timescale matching, separation, and nontemporal sequences—and discuss how these interactions were studied in the past as well as how they can contribute to the systematic investigation of complex autonomous and adaptive systems in both biological and artificial entities.