Control

Real-Time Control

Real-time control is control computation subject to hard timing deadlines, where a late result is a wrong result. Robot servo loops typically run at 1 to 10 kHz, whole-body and impedance controllers at hundreds of hertz, and missed deadlines or jitter degrade stability margins. Achieving determinism requires real-time operating systems, deterministic fieldbuses such as EtherCAT, and careful isolation from non-deterministic workloads like vision or neural network inference.

Why it matters for physical AI

Learned components must coexist with hard real-time loops, so architectures that pair high-rate deterministic control with slower policy inference, connected through action chunking or setpoint streaming, are central to deploying neural policies on physical robots.