Embodied AI involves making software based agents that interact with and operate in the physical world.

Currently a lot of research around this areas involves simulating 3d worlds and training agents to solve problems in it. The idea is that development in this highly controlled environment will lead to approaches that will also work outside in the real world.

In this article Facebook AI announce some new development in this field.

• The first audio-visual platform for embodied AI.
• An end-to-end learnable framework for building top-down semantic maps (showing where objects are located) and spatio-semantic memories (“mental maps”)
• state-of-the-art results in both navigation and exploration of unfamiliar spaces even when some areas are hidden or out of view

This field is still in its infancy and is yet to produce much of practical use, but I will be keeping my eye on it I think AI will have interact more directly with the world into order to achieve its full potential.