Physical AI · Vehicles · Robots · Industry leadership
Al Arab, Ph.D.
Physical AI Principal Engineer & Technical Lead
Executive Director, GenAuto AI · NYU Tandon and CCNY
I lead Physical AI engineering for autonomous systems: vehicles, robots, and industrial machines that operate in the real world. My teams design evaluation and launch systems that convert safety requirements into production-ready autonomy.
- 10+ yearsPhysical AI in production
- Principal EngineerVehicles & Robots
- 5U.S. patents
- IEEESenior Member
Capabilities
Physical AI systems: vehicles, robots, and industrial operations
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01
Physical AI Systems
Design and deploy AI that controls physical machines: autonomous vehicles, mobile robots, and industrial equipment. Architect perception-to-action pipelines that operate safely in unstructured environments with real-world constraints and failure modes.
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02
Safety-Critical Validation
Build evaluation frameworks for Physical AI systems that must prove safety before deployment. Translate operational requirements into quantitative metrics, simulation scenarios, and human-baseline comparisons for autonomous vehicles and industrial robots.
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03
Production ML Infrastructure
Architect vision, sensor fusion, and time-series models for Physical AI. Deploy inference pipelines that feed real-time control systems and offline validation. Build continuous monitoring for deployed autonomy in vehicles and industrial operations.
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04
Release Engineering for Autonomy
Design simulation-led evaluation systems that gate production launches. Establish release criteria for Physical AI: scenario coverage, edge-case handling, and safety envelope verification for autonomous vehicles and industrial robots before field deployment.
Experience
Selected appointments
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2024–
GenAuto AI
Executive Director
Physical AI product engineering for autonomous vehicles; generative systems for edge-case discovery and risk assessment in real-world driving scenarios.
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2023–24
Nuro
Senior Autonomous Vehicle Researcher
Physical AI fault response and safety systems for production autonomous vehicles; ODD-aware behavior in ML-driven driving systems.
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2020–23
Nokia Bell Labs
Robotics Research Scientist
Physical AI for industrial mobile robots: functional safety, predictive control, and digital twin systems for manufacturing automation.
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2016–20
Verizon
Principal Research Engineer
Edge compute and 5G infrastructure for Physical AI systems: connected vehicles and robots. Verification and validation automation for real-time autonomy.
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2013–14
KUKA Robotics
Machine Vision and Robotics Engineering Intern
Industrial automation and machine vision.
IP
Patents
- 2025 Trust through transparency: explainable social navigation for autonomous mobile robots via vision-language models
- 2024 Safe agile hazard avoidance system for autonomous vehicles
- 2024 Motion planning and control method of an overactuated four-wheel drive with constrained independent steering
- 2021 Smart IoT self-healing network
- 2019 Synchronization for battery powered IoT networks
Stack: Python, PyTorch, ROS, MATLAB/Simulink, C/C++, simulation.