Control

Latency

Latency is the time delay between a cause and its observable effect in a system, such as the interval between a sensor reading and the corresponding actuator response. In robotics it accumulates across sensing, perception, policy inference, communication, and actuation stages. Excessive or variable latency degrades closed-loop stability, limits achievable control bandwidth, and makes contact-rich or dynamic tasks difficult to execute reliably.

Why it matters for physical AI

Large learned policies can take tens of milliseconds per inference, so budgeting latency across perception and control determines whether a foundation model can run reactive, contact-rich manipulation on real hardware.