Plaksha University advances India’s AI and robotics frontier

Plaksha University is positioning itself at the center of India’s technological transformation through deep-tech research and interdisciplinary innovation. During the university’s second convocation, Founding Chancellor Dr. Shankar Sastry highlighted the emergence of ‘Physical AI’—artificial intelligence that moves beyond digital screens into the physical world.

Through the university’s Embodied Intelligence and Robotics lab (EMBER), researchers are developing humanoid robots capable of tasks such as search and rescue, assembly, and table tennis. Dr. Sastry noted that this shift toward physical AI will require a new generation of lean, power-efficient processors designed for edge computing.

Addressing the future of the field, Dr. Sastry identified AI safety and the alignment of competing agents as the defining unsolved problems of the decade. He also cautioned against the escalating costs of training increasingly large models, suggesting that the pursuit of massive data scales could face significant budgetary constraints.