Date: March 11, 2026
Speaker: Lirong Xiang, Assistant Professor, Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering, Cornell University
Title: From Lab to Field: Bridging Physical AI, Digital Twins, and Domain-Aware Robotics for Real-World Deployment
Abstract: Reliable autonomy in unstructured, dynamic environments remains a fundamental challenge for physical AI. While commercial robotic platforms excel in controlled settings, they often fail to generalize to real-world deployments that require robustness, adaptability, and precise control. This talk presents new research directions for resilient autonomy at the intersection of digital twins, physical AI, multi-agent reasoning, and integrated hardware–software co-design that together enable robots to perform delicate and uncertain tasks beyond the capability of off-the-shelf systems. Agricultural environments serve as an ideal stress-test domain for this work: complex, partially observable, highly variable, and safety-critical. Using case studies such as precision robotic manipulation (e.g., grasping deformable biological objects), robot-assisted disease detection, and micro-scale deployment tasks, we demonstrate how foundational advances in perception, planning, and multi-agent AI enable autonomy to operate reliably from controlled laboratory conditions to real-world field environments. The insights translate broadly to other domains requiring robust physical AI, including environmental monitoring, inspection robotics, automated network infrastructure tasks, trustworthy and robust autonomy, and infrastructure-aware digital twins for physical systems. The talk concludes with opportunities for cross-domain collaboration to advance the foundations of resilient, generalizable physical AI.
Bio: Dr. Lirong Xiang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University. She was previously an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering at NC State University from 2022 to 2025, with affiliations in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the NC Plant Sciences Initiative. Dr. Xiang received her Ph.D. in Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering from Iowa State University in 2022 and her B.S. in Biosystems Engineering from Zhejiang University in 2017.
She currently serves as a guest editor for Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, as an associate editor for the Journal of the ASABE, and as an associate editor for The Plant Phenome Journal. Dr. Xiang’s research interests include robotics, computer vision, and machine learning, with a focus on developing innovative and sustainable solutions for crop production, plant health monitoring, and agricultural system optimization.