Software & Middleware

Time Synchronization

Time synchronization is the alignment of clocks and data timestamps across a robot's sensors, computers, and actuators so that measurements can be fused coherently. Techniques range from network protocols such as NTP and IEEE 1588 PTP to hardware triggering and pulse-per-second signals that align camera exposures with LiDAR sweeps and IMU samples. Millisecond-level errors are enough to corrupt visual-inertial odometry, sensor fusion, and the observation-action alignment of learned policies.

Why it matters for physical AI

Training data for robot foundation models pairs observations with actions at specific instants, so timestamp skew during collection or inference translates directly into degraded policy precision and hard-to-diagnose deployment failures.