Towards Trustworthy Physical AI: From Theory to Practice Across Life Cycle
Authors: Wang Yang, Hongxuan Liu, Xinghui Xu, Arjun Menon, Xiaoran Cai, Yunyu He, Jingzong Zhou, Mengzhong Ma, +24 more
Organizations: Case Western Reserve University · Massachusetts Institute of Technology · New York University · Princeton University · Columbia University · University of California, Riverside · Nanyang Technological University · Georgia Institute of Technology · Harvard University · University of Oxford · University of Toronto · University of Washington · University of Chicago · Carnegie Mellon University · Cornell University · NVIDIA · Salesforce · Imperial College London · Mila, Université de Montréal · Stanford University
Physical AI refers to AI systems that understand, reason about, and act in accordance with the physical world and its underlying laws, dynamics, and constraints. Unlike conventional AI systems, physical AI interacts continuously with uncertain physical environments, and its actions produce consequences that are physically irreversible. As existing trustworthy AI frameworks have been developed primarily for digital AI systems, they do not fully capture the distinctive challenges of physical AI, such as physical safety, cyber-physical security, and physical manufacturing process. To address this gap, we present a survey of trustworthy physical AI principles. First, we characterize the core capabilities and challenges of physical AI. Second, we examine the role of physics in AI. Third, we trace the end-to-end physical AI life cycle across five core stages and introduce Trustworthy Physical AI Operationalization (T-PAIO). Fourth, we develop the Trustworthy Physical AI (T-PAI) framework, a theoretical framework that organizes key trustworthiness principles and provides a foundation for governing trustworthy physical AI systems.
The integration of large-scale foundation models with physical embodiments has led to significant advancements in robotics known as Generative Physical Artificial Intelligence (GPAI). These agentic AI systems autonomously perceive, reason, and act in complex real-world situations. This survey comprehensively analyzes GPAI systems, focusing on their architectural foundations, current applications, and key limitations. We introduce a taxonomy of five distinct approaches: Robot Foundation Models (RFMs) for cross-platform skill transfer; Vision-Language Action (VLA) models for end-to-end multi-modal perception and control; Large Behavior Models (LBMs) for human-like movement generation; Diffusion Policy Models (DPMs) for diffusion model-based temporally coherent action generation; and World Foundation Models (WFMs) for physics-compliant simulation and data generation. We examine how these approaches complement each other: WFMs generate training data for VLAs and DPMs, RFMs enable cross-platform deployment of learned policies, while LBMs provide motion priors for natural behavior. Through examples across autonomous vehicles, industrial automation, healthcare robotics, and humanoid systems, we identify significant performance improvements and summarize promising research directions in data-efficient learning, sim-to-real transfer, edge-compatible architectures, and safety frameworks. These insights advance embodied AI for IoT-connected environments where intelligent agents interact with networked sensors, actuators, and edge devices.
Physical AI systems increasingly map multimodal observations, language instructions, and learned world representations into physically consequential actions. Robotics foundation models, vision-language-action models, and world-model-based autonomous systems can condition decisions that move vehicles, robots, drones, and industrial machines. This transition exposes a safety problem that is not fully captured by conventional AI content moderation or by classical robot safety alone: a black-box model may issue a physically consequential action while appearing confident, plausible, and semantically aligned. The resulting failure can be silent, arising from sensor drift, occlusion, state-estimation error, distribution shift, hallucinated affordances, or invalid physical assumptions before downstream hardware controllers detect a violation. Across embodied foundation models, world models, robotics simulation, embodied safety benchmarks, safe control, runtime assurance, uncertainty estimation, verification, and guardrail evaluation, model capability and safety mechanisms have advanced along largely separate technical tracks. A recurring gap synthesized here is that no single stream surveyed in this review supplies a complete runtime authorization boundary between black-box Physical AI models and physical execution. The resulting analysis develops a bounded problem formulation, a definition of silent physical-action failure, a taxonomy of runtime guardrail functions, and evaluation requirements for comparing guardrails as Physical AI assurance mechanisms.
Physical AI relies on frequently-updated, latency-sensitive video stream to perceive, reason, and interact with the physical world, resulting in strict latency requirements with much higher data volumes that existing 5G networks cannot support. Goal-oriented communication (GoC) offers as a promising approach to solve this challenge by transmitting only task-relevant semantic representations. However, existing GoC frameworks were mainly evaluated in the simulations while their effectiveness has never been validated in a practical deployment of physical AI application. In this work, we develop an end-to-end GoC testbed for Physical AI, which connects a PiPER robot arm equipped with an RGB-D camera and a 5G modem to an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin edge server through a 5G OpenAirInterface network. We propose and implement three GoC frameworks that transmit 3D bounding boxes, 2D scene graphs, and 3D scene graphs, as three types of semantic representations, respectively. They share the common functional modules designed for closed-loop Physical AI applications, including semantic extraction, full stack 5G transmission, language model inference, digital twin validation, and robotic control. Extensive experiments on our testbed show that our GoC frameworks reduce the task completion time by up to 52.6% and improve task success probability by up to 45%, compared to the traditional framework that periodically transmits the raw image data. These results validate the practical effectiveness of our GoC framework and pave the way for efficient and reliable Physical AI applications over future 6G networks. Project website: https://sites.google.com/view/goc-physical-ai-testbed.