Chronos Policy conditions robot control on real physical timestamps, not sequence indices

SongShuran · x · 2026-10-14

Most robot policies treat time implicitly, using sequence position as a proxy for physical time; real robot systems rarely run on a fixed clock — sensors run at different rates, observations arrive late, and actions take time to compute and execute.
Chronos Policy is a diffusion policy that explicitly conditions on observation capture times and requested action execution times, using time-aware positional encodings so attention depends on elapsed physical time.
Timestamps let the policy interpret each sequence's timing, enabling randomized timing augmentation during training for robust real-world deployment. The thesis: model physical time across the whole stack, because the physical world runs on real time, not sequence indices.

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