Part of the John Bailey Institute

Physical AI, taught and built.

Machines that see, think and act are going to be everywhere, on this planet and past it. That part is already being settled by economics. The open question is how fast, and its answer is physical: energy, compute, and the loop between them. This is where that gets taught, measured, and built in the open.

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The loop

Every physical machine runs one loop.

Perceive, simulate, act, then again, faster than thought. It's the single idea beneath every course, lab, and system here.

● THE LOOP · LIVE
✥ Drag an obstacle or the goal. The route re-plans
A★
01 · Perceive

It sees.

Cameras, LiDAR, and touch collapse into one picture of the world: depth, objects, and the free space to move through, built on the device in milliseconds.

02 · Simulate

It predicts.

Before it moves, the machine runs the future in a digital twin, many routes and many rollouts, and keeps the plan that survives contact with reality.

03 · Act

It acts.

Before it commits, the action is checked against the one energy the body descends, a proof it won't diverge, then becomes motion: torque, balance, grip. The world it's moving through changes.

↻ And again

It never stops.

Perceive, simulate, act, then perceive again, many times a second. That closed loop (on the device, certifying each action before it commits) is agency: a body that holds its own boundary, on its own power. Intelligence is the other axis.

Latest from the Institute

The work, newest first.

51 papers, 29 courses and 33 research topics, newest first. Drag the row, or use the arrows.

Paper
TR-2026-47

What Do You Type?

The software toolchain of thermodynamic computing, surveyed across five language ecosystems. The hardware argument is settled enough to fund. The interface question, what a person or an agent actually writes and what comes back, is not, and it is now the binding constraint.

Course
PAI-350

Reading an Energy Claim

Almost every energy figure published about a machine is a property of something other than the machine. Watt-hours describe a pack; hours of runtime d

Topic
TR-2026-43

The Two Operating Systems

A body runs a substrate that acts before any signal is processed and an information system that rides on top. The data thesis scales only the second,

Lab
Lab

The Energy Lab

Derive the memory tax yourself, then price the transition

Course
PAI-340

Trusting the Mesh: When a Sensor Network Stops Telling the Truth

A sensing system divides a volume into three parts and reports two of them. There is what a sensor reached and read correctly, there is what no sensor

Paper
TR-2026-46

Where Is the Energy Reporting?

Embodied energy is measured in the research literature and is being standardised for the industrial arm. It is reported nowhere a buyer, an operator or a regulator can act on. The binding constraint is disclosure, not instrumentation, and that makes it a qualification problem before it is an engineering one.

Topic
TR-2026-40

The Physical AI hardware lottery

A robot can hold several right answers at once by learning a landscape instead of a number. That needs an operation today's chips are the wrong shape

Benchmark
Benchmark

Physics-fidelity benchmark

Score whether a model obeys physics, not whether it looks right

Course
PAI-330

The Cost of the Loop: What a sense is worth, and how many runs before a difference is real

PAI-320 establishes what a body carries below its first transducer. This course prices it. You will put a joule figure against each of four sensor cha

Topic
TR-2026-35

Sim to Real: the road to physical agency

Four walls stand between a policy that works in simulation and one that works on a body. What the record measures at each, read in twenty-three langua

Paper
TR-2026-45

Six Ways a Body Cheats

The mechanisms human movement uses to make acrobatics affordable, five of them priced against an identified power model, and the four predictions of ours that the pricing falsified.

Live
Live

The live classroom

An AI teacher draws runnable simulations on a shared board

Course
PAI-320

The Two Operating Systems: What a Body Carries That No Dataset Contains

Companies and academic centres are converging on the view that a sufficient volume of recorded experience will unlock Physical AI, and the strongest e

Topic
TR-2026-39

The portable core

Energy that ships to its load needs a crew that is not there. The world is building that autonomy; this review did not locate work on the layer that l

Build
Build

Forge

Describe a robot, simulate it, then teach it to walk in your browser

Paper
TR-2026-44

The Unknown Fraction

Agricultural sensing reports what it measured. It does not report what it could not see. Three instruments over three unrelated physics find the same division, and four industries already pay for the quantity none of them computes.

Course
PAI-310

The Hardware Lottery: Energy-Based Models and Post-von-Neumann Architecture

In 2020 Sara Hooker described a mechanism she called the hardware lottery: a research idea advances partly because it suits the available hardware, an

Topic
TR-2026-36

Harnessing energy observability

A machine's power draw reports what it actually did, not what its software says it did. How far that report reaches is decided by the body it is measu

Data
Data

The global energy database

Eighty-five claims, each with its verification grade

Course
PAI-300

The Unattended Plant: Energy That Ships, Intelligence That Crews It

Portable nuclear is the first energy technology that moves to its load instead of tethering the load to a grid, and a plant too small to carry a round

Paper
TR-2026-42

What a Machine Spends Looking

Task energy on a body is reported as compute against everything else. Sensing is measurable on the same meter, is not separated, and how large it has to be is set by the body before any perception exists.

Topic
TR-2026-37

Can a machine prove it is itself?

A drivetrain carries a manufacturing signature you can measure. Priced in bits it buys verification, and it does not buy a cryptographic key.

Play
Play

Pilot

Drive an embodied policy with a real controller

Paper
EFA-RFC-002

RELAX/1

Ten operations, an MLIR and NIR-style exchange form, and a lowering matrix across substrates.

Course
PAI-290

Energy as Evidence: What a Machine Can Prove About Itself

Software asserts. Energy is spent. A power trace is the one account of a machine's activity its own code cannot simply write, which makes energy the n

Paper
TR-2026-41

Joules per Punch

Where the energy of a humanoid strike goes, why a segmented spine costs more than one waist joint at every demand both can meet, and why it is still the only body that throws the hardest strike.

Topic
TR-2026-38

Two certificates: one for danger, one for waste

A safety proof checked before every action keeps a compromised policy from going anywhere unsafe. A second proof, written over energy rather than dist

Paper
EFA-RFC-001

OER/1 and DRIFT/1

A receipt schema for energy claims, and a benchmark protocol for learning under drift.

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The Institute for Physical AI is an autonomous division of the John Bailey Institute, a 501(c)(3) aviation-education nonprofit. Explore the Institute, its programs, and how to support the mission.