Caterpillar and CoreWeave team up to shorten physical AI learning loops
Speaking at CoreWeave's Fully Connected event, Brandon Hootman, Caterpillar's VP of physical AI platforms and construction autonomy, and Richard Ahlfeld, CoreWeave's SVP of physical AI, described their collaboration on autonomous construction equipment. Caterpillar's digital ecosystem already holds about 18 petabytes of federated data from machines, dealers and customers, while a single machine can generate terabytes of lidar, camera, control and performance data in a day. Working with Nvidia, the partners use AI models to annotate and label incoming field data, cutting work that used to take weeks or months down to hours so the simulation and training loop closes within a workday. CoreWeave named Caterpillar among its enterprise customers in its second-quarter results and launched a Physical AI Field Engineering service in September.
Physical AI training demands storage, data pipelines and on-site engineering, making it a new front for cloud providers partnering with industrial equipment makers.
Caterpillar and CoreWeave shorten the learning loop for physical AI
Demand for new data centers, power plants and highways is fueling a construction boom, even as the industry wrestles with declining productivity and a shortage of skilled machine operators. Physical AI, which lets machines perceive their surroundings and act on them, is emerging as one answer.
Caterpillar Inc. has years of experience with autonomous equipment in mining. Extending that technology to construction requires systems that can adapt to more variable conditions, according to Brandon Hootman (pictured, right), vice president of physical AI platforms and construction autonomy at Caterpillar.
“Once that mine site gets instantiated, it does change, but it doesn’t change frequently,” he said. “You go to construction as an industry. Polar opposite of mining. If you think about all of the dynamics of what has to happen, taking a structured system and matching it to an unstructured environment, it’s really, really challenging to do.”