DAG-Based QoS-Aware Dynamic Task Placement for Networked Multi-Stage Control Pipelines

Abstract

Current Physical AI (PAI) relies heavily on closed-loop visual-servoing pipelines, whose perception and planning stages may become computationally intensive onboard due to complex models embedded on robots. In practice, offloading the perception task to on-site edges statically is inappropriate for latency-sensitive, precise industrial settings over a standardized industrial network. This emphasizes the importance of Control-Communication-Computing (3C) co-design in industrial automation: monolithic local execution saturates AI-accelerated machine and robot hardware, while static edge offloading exposes the control loop to network jitter. Existing adaptive task placement (ATP) controllers can partially address the gap by relocating a single pipeline stage on binary threshold rules, without a multi-stage model and an explicit cost on placement switching. In this paper, we propose a directed acyclic graph (DAG) based quality-of-service (QoS)-aware dynamic task placement (DTP) framework for sensing-perception-planning-control pipelines in networked robotics. This pipeline is formalized as a DAG with task-level and node-level attributes for compute cost, communication delay, and feasible placement sets; over a small interpretable candidate set (fully local, static offload, hybrid), a window-based cost function combines tail end-to-end latency, deadline violation rate, hardware utilization, and a Hamming-distance switching penalty, and a DTP algorithm with hysteresis and a minimum dwell-time bounds placement chatter. Our work presents the theoretical framework, a structured qualitative analysis, and a two-phase simulation plus hardware-in-the-loop validation roadmap.