When Delay Meets Drift: Physical Safety of Robot Foundation Models Is a Cross-Layer Problem

Abstract

Robot foundation models now act in a closed loop, yet their safety is evaluated one variation at a time: robustness benchmarks perturb the scene while assuming instantaneous inference, and real-time execution methods study inference delay in nominal scenes. We argue that physical safety is not a property of the model alone, but emerges from how variations in the physical environment, the model, the computing platform, and execution interact in closed loop. We formalize this as cross-layer variation propagation across these system layers and use an interaction contrast to measure when joint variation creates more risk than the sum of its parts. In 4,000 paired closed-loop episodes of the pi0.5 vision-language-action model on LIBERO, a 400 ms inference delay raises the safety-violation rate by 3.5 percentage points under the training viewpoint but by 37 percentage points under a 60-degree camera shift: 33.5 percentage points (95% CI: 25-43) more than the two effects combined. We close with a research agenda toward predictable physical intelligence: predicting when variation becomes risk, and adapting compute, power, and control accordingly.