Real-time inference for robots at Physical Intelligence

Physical Intelligence (Pi) is developing a general-purpose robotic intelligence system whose Visual-Language-Action models continuously convert camera observations, natural-language instructions, and robot state data into motor commands. To validate each model revision, Pi runs real-world robot evaluations around the clock, requiring scalable low-latency inference across a growing fleet. While Modal Tunnels provide direct, secure TCP access for many latency-sensitive applications, Pi’s continuous control loops were vulnerable to TCP jitter and request stalls, so Pi and Modal developed a QUIC-over-UDP portal with persistent bidirectional connections, NAT traversal, STUN discovery, and UDP hole punching. The system adds roughly 10–15 milliseconds of network overhead while allowing robots without onboard GPUs to use remote, data-center-class hardware. Modal also enables Pi to mount model checkpoints through Modal Volumes, reducing loading time to under 30 seconds, and to deploy inference in regions near robot fleets, supporting expansion without local GPU infrastructure or custom relay systems.

Use this post, company, and trend context to find content marketing opportunities, perform competitive analysis, or address product feature gaps via the Plushcap MCP server or the Plushcap API.