The Foundation Model Approach to Robotics
Physical Intelligence's core thesis is that robotics should adopt the same paradigm shift that transformed language AI: instead of training a bespoke model for each robot hardware variant and task, train a single generalist foundation model with broad physical understanding, then fine-tune it for specific hardware and tasks with a small amount of demonstration data.
The pi2 model was trained on over 10,000 hours of robot demonstration data spanning manipulation, navigation, and object recognition across more than 50 hardware platforms. A hardware partner can access the model via API, provide 200-400 demonstrations of their target task, and receive a fine-tuned checkpoint ready for deployment in approximately 72 hours.
Deployed Commercial SKUs
The 12 commercially active robot product lines using pi2 include picking arms from three major warehouse robotics vendors, shelf-scanning units from two retail automation companies, a parcel-sorting system deployed across DHL facilities in Europe, and a last-metre indoor delivery robot used in hospital logistics.
Physical Intelligence reports that pi2-powered robots achieve task success rates 18-27% higher than the same hardware running vendor-specific models, with the gains most pronounced on tasks involving irregular or loosely packed items.
Next Steps
Physical Intelligence is developing a pi2-Mobile variant optimised for legged and wheeled mobile platforms. A commercial preview is expected at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in November 2026.