Most robot policies treat time implicitly, using sequence position as a proxy for physical time. But real robot systems rarely run on a fixed clock. Sensors run at different rates, observations arrive with delays, and actions take time to compute and execute. Successful control depends not only on what the robot observes but also on the timing of observations and actions.
We introduce 🕒 Chronos Policy, a diffusion policy that explicitly conditions on observation capture times and requested action execution times. We use time-aware positional encodings to make attention depend on elapsed physical time. Because timestamps let the policy interpret each sequence's timing, we can randomize sensing and action timing during training without making those variations ambiguous. This exposes the policy to a wider range of timing conditions, improving robustness to timing changes at deployment.