cs.NIMar 16, 2026

The Internet of Physical AI Agents: Interoperability, Longevity, and the Cost of Getting It Wrong

Authors: Roberto Morabito, Mallik Tatipamula

Organizations: EURECOM, France · Ericsson Silicon Valley, USA

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Abstract

The Internet has evolved by progressively expanding what humanity connects: first computers, then people, and later billions of devices through the Internet of Things (IoT). While IoT succeeded in digitizing perception at scale, it also exposed fundamental limitations, including fragmentation, weak security, limited autonomy, and poor long-term sustainability. Today, advances in edge hardware, sensing, connectivity, and artificial intelligence enable a new phase: the Internet of Physical AI Agents. Unlike IoT devices that primarily sense and report, Physical AI Agents perceive, reason, and act in real time, operating autonomously and cooperatively across safety-critical domains such as disaster response, healthcare, industrial automation, and mobility. However, embedding fast-evolving AI capabilities into long-lived physical infrastructure introduces new architectural risks, particularly around interoperability, lifecycle management, and premature ossification. This article revisits lessons from IoT and Internet evolution, and articulates design principles for building resilient, evolvable, and trustworthy agentic systems. We present an architectural blueprint encompassing agentic identity, secure agent-to-agent communication, semantic interoperability, policy-governed runtimes, and observability-driven governance. We argue that treating evolution, trust, and interoperability as first-class requirements is essential to avoid hard-coding today's assumptions into tomorrow's intelligent infrastructure, and to prevent the high technical and economic cost of getting it wrong.

Figures & tables

Fig. 1: Lifecycle mismatch between fast-moving AI artifacts and slow-moving physical agents increases operational debt and accelerates agentic ossification.
DimensionInternet of Things (IoT)Internet of Physical AI Agents
Role in the systemDigitized perceptionEmbodied intelligence
FunctionSense and reportPerceive, reason, and act
ArchitectureReporting pipelineReflexive control system
IntelligenceCentralized in the cloudDistributed across agents and edge
InteroperabilityFragmented ecosystemsOpen, interoperable fabric
Trust modelRetrofitted securitySecurity by design
TABLE I: From IoT to the Internet of Physical AI Agents: Architectural Lessons
Fig. 2: Layered Reference Architecture for the Internet of Physical AI Agents.
Fig. 3: Reference control-loop architecture for Physical AI Agents, integrating local reflexes, fleet-level coordination, and governance feedback under explicit safety and trust constraints.
Fig. 4: Distributed wildfire response system based on Physical AI Agents. Autonomous drones detect and classify fire events, coordinate through an edge mission orchestrator, and trigger suppression actions over a deterministic communication fabric with identity, policy, and audit controls.
Fig. 5: Closed-loop insulin delivery system implemented as a Physical AI Agent, integrating continuous sensing, on-device prediction and control, safety policy enforcement, secure lifecycle management, and auditability.
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