PLEASANTON, Calif., and ROORKEE – Avathon, a leader in Autonomy for Operations, and the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (IIT Roorkee), one of India’s premier institutions of national importance, today announced the launch of the Avathon Physical AI Lab (Avathon PAL), a research initiative dedicated to advancing the science of Physical AI for the industrial economy. The proposed laboratory will be established in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at IIT Roorkee. The laboratory is envisaged to serve as a centre for collaborative research in Physical AI and to deepen collaboration with leading academic institutions across India and around the world.
The partnership pairs Avathon’s leadership in bringing autonomy to industrial operations with IIT Roorkee’s deep bench of research talent in optimization, machine learning, knowledge representation, and multi-agent systems. Together, the parties intend to build a durable foundation for cutting-edge Physical AI research focused on the most difficult problems in the industrial economy, from supply planning and logistics at scale to knowledge-driven, continuously learning autonomous systems.
“IIT Roorkee shaped how I think about the world and what’s possible within it. Returning to build something lasting here is deeply personal,” said Pervinder Johar, Chief Executive Officer of Avathon and an alumnus of IIT Roorkee. “The talent and rigor at this institution are extraordinary, and the challenges facing the industrial world today are exactly the problems this partnership is built to solve. Physical AI is how we bring autonomy to the industrial economy, and there is no better place to advance that science than where my own journey began.”
The Avathon PAL will work in close concert with Avathon’s newly formed AI Center of Excellence (COE) in Bangalore. Together, the lab and the COE are designed to form a bridge between frontier research and real-world deployment, with science emerging from IIT Roorkee feeding directly into solutions that put autonomy into production across mining, energy, manufacturing, logistics, aerospace, and other industrial sectors. The Bangalore COE will anchor Avathon’s growing research and engineering presence in India and serve as the primary industrial counterpart to the lab’s academic work.
“This partnership brings a rare combination of academic freedom and real-world industrial relevance to our research community,” said Prof. Sugata Gangopadhyay, Principal Investigator of the Avathon PAL, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, IIT Roorkee. “Working alongside Avathon, a company at the forefront of bringing Physical AI to industrial operations, gives our researchers both the problems and the ambition worthy of them.”
The Avathon PAL intends to support a range of activities, including sponsored doctoral fellowships, collaborative research across multiple problem areas, student internships and industry exposure at Avathon, and workshops and technical events that connect the initiative to the broader research community. The lab reflects a shared conviction that the next frontier of artificial intelligence lies not in enterprise IT but on the factory floor, in the supply chain, and across critical infrastructure – the physical operations that move and sustain the global economy.