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Abstract - AsyncShield: A Plug-and-Play Edge Adapter for Asynchronous Cloud-based VLA Navigation
While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have been demonstrated possessing strong zero-shot generalization for robot control, their massive parameter sizes typically necessitate cloud-based deployment. However, cloud deployment introduces network jitter and inference latency, which can induce severe spatiotemporal misalignment in mobile navigation under continuous displacement, so that the stale intents expressed in past ego frames may become spatially incorrect in the current frame and lead to collisions. To address this issue, we propose AsyncShield, a plug-and-play asynchronous control framework. AsyncShield discards traditional black-box time-series prediction in favor of a deterministic physical white-box spatial mapping. By maintaining a temporal pose buffer and utilizing kinematic transformations, the system accurately converts temporal lag into spatial pose offsets to restore the VLA's original geometric intent. To balance intent restoration fidelity and physical safety, the edge adaptation is formulated as a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). Solved via the PPO-Lagrangian algorithm, a reinforcement learning adapter dynamically trades off between tracking the VLA intent and responding to high-frequency LiDAR obstacle avoidance hard constraints. Furthermore, benefiting from a standardized universal sub-goal interface, domain randomization, and perception-level adaptation via Collision Radius Inflation, AsyncShield operates as a lightweight, plug-and-play module. Simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate that, without fine-tuning any cloud-based foundation models, the framework exhibits zero-shot and robust generalization capabilities, effectively improving the success rate and physical safety of asynchronous navigation.
AsyncShield:面向异步云端VLA导航的即插即用边缘适配器 /
AsyncShield: A Plug-and-Play Edge Adapter for Asynchronous Cloud-based VLA Navigation
1️⃣ 一句话总结
针对云端视觉-语言-行动模型因网络延迟导致导航不准确甚至碰撞的问题,本文提出一种轻量级边缘端适配器,通过物理空间映射将时间滞后转化为位置偏移,并利用强化学习在遵循模型意图与避障安全之间动态平衡,无需修改云端模型即可提升导航成功率和安全性。