Interdisciplinary Workshop on Mechanical Intelligence: Summary Report

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping mechanical engineering (ME), from modeling, simulation, and optimization to diagnostics, design, and technical communication. Drawing on a round-table at the 28th ABCM International Congress on Mechanical Engineering (COBEM 2025), this article presents a structured perspective for the Brazilian and international ME communities. Rather than an exhaustive survey, it examines how AI can enhance engineering practice without compromising scientific rigor. We distinguish statistical learning from human cognition and discuss the capabilities, limitations, and emerging agentic forms of AI. We then consider industrial adoption, workforce changes, and AI-assisted scientific discovery, alongside the energy and infrastructure demands of AI computation and their implications for sustainability and thermal management. The discussion emphasizes the integration of physical knowledge, structured reasoning, and domain expertise into AI systems, particularly in safety-relevant applications. Topics include physics-informed and hybrid learning, physically constrained modeling, validation, uncertainty quantification, and certification. We also examine educational, epistemological, and ethical challenges, including curriculum reform, human-agent collaboration, professional accountability, and the preservation of engineering knowledge. We conclude with principles for responsible AI adoption in ME: physical consistency, rigorous validation, explicit treatment of uncertainty, energy sustainability, human oversight, and ethical responsibility. AI should complement, not replace, engineering judgment.

Mechanical intelligence, loosely defined as the reduction in control burden afforded by a robot's physical form, has become a prominent concept in robotics, with instantiations in bioinspired robotics, soft robotics, robotic swarms, and many other areas. However, rigorous theoretical understanding and quantitative measures of mechanical intelligence have lagged behind the engineering systems that the community has developed. In this work, using modern legged robots as a benchmark and exemplar, we propose several information-theoretic metrics for quantifying mechanical intelligence. By viewing body dynamics as both a computational process and a communication channel, we show that several prior insights in legged-robot engineering can be described using information theory, and we quantify how bits are processed by mechanical modes and across robot coordinates. Specifically, we examine the trade-off between explicitly incorporating compliance through series-elastic actuation and using so-called proprioceptive, low-gear-ratio transmissions, and we explore how these mechanisms interact with control policies during locomotion. We develop these results on systems of increasing complexity: a simplified linear model of a robot-leg transmission, a nonlinear single-leg simulation, and simulated quadruped robots controlled by a learned policy while navigating challenging terrain. These results lay the groundwork for broader study of robot mechanisms and their role in embodied computation.

AI models are increasingly used in scientific discovery and human decision-making. Yet how AI models work and what risks they pose remain poorly understood. As AI development becomes faster and more automated, research on the mechanisms underlying AI remains largely manual. To bridge this gap, we introduce Mechanist, an agentic system that uses AI as a scientific instrument for the autonomous discovery of mechanisms underlying AI. To ground novel mechanism hypotheses, we construct a scientific knowledge graph of 13,000 studies on AI mechanisms, alongside a multidisciplinary database of 43 million papers spanning 26 fields. For reliable experiment execution, we curate a library of 32 foundational methods for mechanism analysis. Compared with Claude Code and existing AI-scientist systems, Mechanist generates higher-quality mechanism hypotheses and executes experiments more reliably. Across four case studies, Mechanist autonomously discovers new model behaviors and their underlying mechanisms, and translates these discoveries into mechanism-guided interventions and interdisciplinary design. Specifically, Mechanist first uncovers a counterintuitive safety risk in scientific laboratories, showing that unsafe traits can transfer to fine-tuned student models through apparently safe training data and emerge across modalities. Mechanist then develops a mechanism theory of belief, revealing how models represent world knowledge, form beliefs, infer the beliefs of others, and how these mechanisms emerge during pretraining. Building on this theory, Mechanist develops targeted interventions that improve model performance across diverse scenarios. Finally, Mechanist can also advance interdisciplinary discovery through mechanistic design, providing an alternative to the computationally intensive generate-and-rerank paradigm.