IEEE Future Networks Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AIML)
Date: July 17, 2025
Time: 8:00 - 9:00 AM
Location: Virtual
Infrastructure Enabling the Physical AI Revolution
Speaker: Bill McFarland
While generative AI’s automation of office work has captured the headlines recently, AI is just as dramatically transforming physical work. This “Physical AI” is being deployed in factories, agricultural facilities, warehouses, health care facilities, and eventually will be deployed in nursing homes and private residences. This paper describes the unique distributed AI architectures required in these environments, and the attendant networking infrastructure to support them. The environments themselves are large and often outdoors, including warehouses, factory floors, storage facilities, lumber yards, ports, and farms. Increasingly the work is performed by intelligent and flexible robotics. The paper demonstrates the need for edge-based AI to meet the required reliability, latency, cost, security, and trust for these applications. Networking topologies typical of these environments are presented, highlighting their uniquely complicated arrangement of hierarchical and parallel systems with periodic touch points, together with cross network utilization models. Evidence is presented that demonstrates that distributed local AI processing, together with hybrid WiFi and cellular networking, are the best solutions to providing the required performance. A case study of an agricultural processing facility is presented to make the concepts concrete.
Register here:
https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/489020