Asynchronous Robot Policies
Sombit Dey, Luc Van Gool, Danda Pani Paudel
Scaling vision-language foundation models has significantly advanced generalist robot manipulation, but the increased model scale introduces computational latency that degrades real-time physical reactivity. Existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) architectures execute high-level semantic reasoning and action ex- ecution sequentially within the primary control loop, creating a fundamental tension between semantic-reasoning capability and robot agility. To address this, we propose Asynchronous Robot Policy (ARP), an architectural framework that decouples semantic reasoning from low-level action generation using asynchronous processes operating at independent frequencies. In ARP, a high-capacity Vision-Language Model (VLM) asynchronously updates a semantic memory at low fre- quency, while a lightweight Vision-Action Expert, conditioned on this semantic memory, generates robot actions at a much higher control frequency. Such a formulation, enables having a fast perception-action loop without compromising on the semantic capability. To overcome asynchronous memory staleness, ARP trains the vision-action expert on the semantic staleness and execution delay, with temporally mismatched observation across processes. On Franka manipulation tasks, ARP achieves an 18% higher success rate and 20% less time need for execution in quasi-static setups, while 3-5 times baseline performance in dynamic simulation environments. Furthermore, ARP enables operating the VLM at 10 times lower than its nominal frequency with no significant performance loss making it much more efficient than the baseline. These results highlight the architectural advantages of modeling robot policies as asynchronous processes, enabling real-world reactive deployment without sacrificing the scale of foundation models.
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