Ali Agha

Dr. Ali Agha is a Visiting Associate at Caltech. He is also Co-founder and CEO of FieldAI, where he leads the development of next-generation embodied AI and robotic autonomy technologies designed for complex, unstructured, and off-road environments. Dr. Agha served as a Technologist and Group Leader at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and was the Principal Investigator for several of the nation's flagship autonomy programs, including the DARPA Subterranean Challenge, DARPA RACER, and the prototype Mars Helicopter–Rover coordinated autonomy project. Dr. Agha has developed a new class of field-deployable Physical AI models that enable scalable, context-aware, and generalizable behavior in complex settings. His research interests include Physical AI and autonomous systems, with applications to rovers, legged robots, manipulators, and drones.