Offloading robot inference raised VLA accuracy 50% and more than doubled battery life.

Microsoft Research reports 30% better navigation obstacle detection and 50% better VLA model accuracy when inference moves off-robot compared with onboard GPUs. Swapping the Stretch-3's onboard GPU for a Raspberry Pi 5 more than doubled battery life, and a Jetson Thor drained batteries up to 160% faster (Microsoft Research). The Physical AI Toolchain now ships Kubernetes-based offloaded-inference examples for SO-101 and UR10e arms. A network hop to a big GPU beating a small onboard accelerator is not the direction the edge-inference narrative points.