Caterpillar Inc. (NYSE: CAT) said Wednesday it is teaming up with autonomy startup FieldAI to embed physical AI, robot foundation models and NVIDIA-accelerated digital twins across the world's jobsites and factories, extending Caterpillar's push to marry heavy iron with software-driven autonomy.
Foundation models meet 100 years of iron
The collaboration, announced on September 2, 2026 from Caterpillar's Irving, Texas headquarters, pairs Caterpillar's operational data and engineering expertise with FieldAI's robot-agnostic Field Foundation Models™. The models combine data-driven AI with physics-based reasoning and uncertainty awareness, allowing them to control many different robots across unstructured environments where scripted automation typically fails.
"The future of our industries will be shaped by how effectively we combine human expertise with AI-powered machines," Caterpillar chief technology officer Jaime Mineart said. "Collaborations like this help accelerate the journey."
Autonomous inspection, digital twins, situational awareness
Early applications include autonomous inspection routines, jobsite and facility digital twins that fuse machine and infrastructure data, enhanced situational awareness to flag hazards sooner, and simulation-driven operational optimization. Caterpillar and FieldAI will lean on NVIDIA accelerated computing and NVIDIA Omniverse to build the high-fidelity twins, aligning the effort with the "next era of autonomy" vision Caterpillar teased at CES 2026.
A leg up on complex sites
Caterpillar said it picked FieldAI because the startup has already deployed its autonomy stack across hundreds of complex industrial sites worldwide. Backed by Bezos Expeditions, Khosla Ventures, NVIDIA's NVentures, Prysm Capital and Temasek, FieldAI has raised more than $400 million and continues to extend beyond its Ouster Rev8 lidar collaboration announced earlier this year.
"Caterpillar has shaped operations on jobsites and manufacturing facilities for over a century, and these are exactly the environments FieldAI excels in," FieldAI founder and CEO Ali Agha said. "Together, we are shaping the next century of AI-enabled heavy industry."
The deal follows Caterpillar's rollout of autonomous excavators, dozers and haul trucks at CES 2026, and lands just as physical AI leaders like Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics ER 2 push multi-robot orchestration into industrial workflows.
Reporting based on coverage from Caterpillar, FieldAI and NVIDIA.