A latency-aware framework for visuomotor policy learning on industrial robots

Industrial robots are increasingly deployed in construction and manufacturing tasks, where the deployment of end-to-end visuomotor policies is challenged by the observation–execution gap induced by observation, inference, and execution latencies. This gap is often significant on industrial robotic arms due to high-level control interfaces and slower closed-loop dynamics, making execution timing a dominant system-level concern. This paper presents a system-level, latency-aware framework for deploying and evaluating visuomotor policies on industrial robotic arms. The framework integrates latency-calibrated multimodal sensing, data synchronization, a unified communication pipeline, and a teleoperation interface for collecting expert demonstrations. Within this framework, we formalize a latency-aware execution strategy that assigns timestamps to policy-predicted action sequences and schedules only temporally feasible actions according to their intended execution time, enabling asynchronous inference and execution without modifying policy architectures or training procedures. We evaluate the framework on a contact-rich assembly task while systematically varying inference latency and compare latency-aware execution against blocking and naive asynchronous baselines using identical policies and sensing modalities. Results show that latency-aware execution preserves smooth motion, compliant contact behavior, and task progression consistent with demonstrations across inference latencies of 100–500 ms. Latency-aware execution maintained task duration and motion smoothness within 13% and 9% of the demonstration reference, respectively, while avoiding the latency-dependent slowdown observed under blocking execution and the large contact-force overshoots produced by naive asynchronous execution. These findings demonstrate that explicit handling of the observation–execution gap is essential for reproducible, closed-loop deployment of visuomotor policies on industrial robotic platforms.