Collaborative robots need sub-10ms collision avoidance but cloud adds 50-200ms jitter

Collaborative robots (cobots) working alongside humans on assembly lines must detect an approaching human hand and halt within 10ms to comply with ISO 10218 safety standards -- but cloud-based vision inference introduces 50-200ms of variable latency (jitter), meaning the robot arm cannot guarantee it will stop before striking a worker. A single collision that injures a worker shuts down the entire production line for OSHA investigation, costs $100K+ in liability, and creates lasting workforce fear of cobots that undermines adoption. Cloud APIs structurally cannot solve this because network jitter is unpredictable -- even if median latency is 30ms, the 99th percentile spike to 200ms is the one that causes the injury. An on-device vision model running on the cobot's embedded GPU delivers deterministic sub-5ms inference on every frame, and because it never touches a network, there is zero jitter variance, making safety certification possible.