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arXiv · 2609.23305

Shared Execution-Clock Drifting Policy for Dynamic Precision Manipulation

Zhenchen Dong·Qingran Wu·Jinna Fu·Jiaming Wu·Fulin Chen·Hongyu Yu·Yide Liu
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Abstract

Manipulation under time constraints requires both accurate actions and an execution rhythm that matches the evolving scene. This becomes critical when a robot must intercept moving objects or complete a sequence of adjustments before a deadline. Although one-step policies reduce generation cost, their directly predicted action sequences leave temporal allocation implicit. We propose Shared Execution-Clock Drifting (SECD), which makes execution rhythm an explicit part of one-step action generation. Conditioned on an observation and a latent sample, the policy jointly predicts a progress-indexed action curve and a shared monotone clock that maps fixed control times to locations on the curve. Demonstration-derived alignment anchors this decomposition, which is trained jointly through drifting on the decoded actions. The resulting policy retains a fixed-rate control interface and requires one network evaluation. We evaluate SECD across four real-robot tasks with inference on NVIDIA Thor. Across 300 trials, it achieves 77.00% task-averaged success and outperforms the evaluated one-step baselines on every task, including 91% success in cup retrieval from a 16 m/min conveyor and 54% in restoring and folding a crumpled shirt within 90 s. A fixed-clock variant reaches 79% on the same conveyor protocol. Complementary state-based RoboMimic experiments, including cross-seed ablations on Transport and Square, further support the joint design of the temporal representation and demonstration alignment. Project page: https://secd-anonymous-ewn.pages.dev/

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Zhenchen Dong, Qingran Wu, Jinna Fu, Jiaming Wu, Fulin Chen, Hongyu Yu, Yide Liu. 2026-09-20. Shared Execution-Clock Drifting Policy for Dynamic Precision Manipulation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23305

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