Physical AI / Embodied AI

Physical AI (also called embodied AI) builds AI systems that perceive, reason and act in the physical world through robots, increasingly using vision-language and foundation models.

Traditional robot programming is task-specific. Foundation models aim for robots that follow open-ended instructions and generalise across tasks, scenes and bodies.

If general-purpose robot intelligence works, robots become useful far beyond controlled factories, so this is where much of the current research and industry attention is.