4. Physical Intelligence X Deft: factory-proven foundation models
Deft Robotics and Physical Intelligence are bringing general-purpose robot intelligence into real automotive factories.
The task is line feeding: repeatedly picking up parts and placing them onto the production line in the correct position and orientation.
It sounds simple. But parts shift around in the material bin as they’re picked. Each pick presents a different position and orientation, making fixed, rules-based automation impractical to deploy at-scale.
Physical Intelligence’s robot foundation models, paired with Deft’s hardware and deployment stack, let the robot adapt to this variation.
The robot locates each part, adjusts its grasp, and rotates it into position for placement—feeding the line without requiring every part to start in a predefined location.
Across both deployments: 500 hours of operation and more than 10,000 parts processed.
Every intervention surfaces the failures that matter, so the next model learns from real production failures.
It's this iterative loop of deploying, intervening, retraining, and redeploying that makes the robot better over time — not just the cleanest demo.
Robot intelligence becomes useful when it survives the factory.