Arm has established Arm Total Design for Physical AI, a collaborative network of more than 80 companies aimed at accelerating the development and deployment of autonomous systems.
The initiative expands Arm’s existing Total Design programme into the physical AI domain, bringing together expertise across AI models, software, compute hardware, sensors, actuators, virtual platforms, and digital twins to reduce integration complexity and help OEMs move faster from proof of concept to scaled deployment.
“As agentic AI expands what intelligent systems can do, physical AI is bringing that intelligence into the industries that mine materials our world depends on, grow the food that sustains it, manufacture products and move people and goods around the globe,” wrote Drew Henry, Executive Vice President of Physical AI at Arm, in a blogpost.
“Unlocking that opportunity means enabling intelligent machines to sense, reason and act by bringing together AI models, software, compute, sensors and actuators into complete systems that can be trusted and deployed at scale,” he added.
Joining the programmes are more than 80 companies across the physical AI stack including AWS, ECARX, Hugging Face, Liquid AI, NXP, PlusAI, PSYONIC, QNX, Qwen, Siemens, and Unitree Robotics.
An example of this collaboration is in automotive, where Arm, AWS, Google, Here, RemotiveLabs, and Siemens have produced an integrated digital cockpit reference solution that lets developers build, test and validate complex automotive software on Arm’s Zena CSS before silicon is available.
Seeking common language
Alongside the partner network, Arm has introduced a Robotics Capability Framework as one of the ecosystem’s first joint initiatives. This is designed to define levels of increasing sophistication for robotic systems and link real-world use cases to behaviour, outputs and system requirements such as latency, compute placement, memory, power constraints, determinism, and safety.
According to Arm Chief Architect Richard Grisenthwaite in a related manifesto, while robotics is advancing rapidly, the industry still lacks a common way to describe, compare and communicate the capabilities of increasingly intelligent machines.
The initial structure of the framework was informed by feedback from robotics players including Anaxi Labs, ANYbotics, FMC³ Robotics, Fourier, Galbot, Gravis Robotics, Lenovo, McKinsey, and Robotec.ai, with Arm inviting broader industry participation to shape its evolution.
Entelechy Asia 