We had the great pleasure of organising the first virtual workshop on Embodied Intelligence, held on March 24–26, 2021. After the long struggle of more than a year with the pandemic, all of us were in strong need of interdisciplinary cross-fertilization events, even in a severely limited virtual setting. Even though it was a difficult time to organise anything, we had the luck of attracting over 1,000 registered participants to this event, with more than 100 presentations along with many active debates and discussions. Some of these lectures and debates are available at https://embodied-intelligence.org/.
Because of the very successful event, we decided to organise this Special Issue on Embodied Intelligence in the Artificial Life journal to capture some of the discussions and document them in the format of journal publications. For this reason, the authors and reviewers of this special issue were mostly participants of the workshop. We are...