LAECIPS: Large Vision Model Assisted Adaptive Edge-Cloud Collaboration for IoT-based Embodied Intelligence System

Abstract

Embodied intelligence (EI) enables manufacturing systems to flexibly perceive, reason, adapt, and operate within dynamic shop floor environments. In smart manufacturing, a representative EI scenario is robotic visual inspection, where industrial robots must accurately inspect components on rapidly changing, heterogeneous production lines. This task requires both high inference accuracy especially for uncommon defects and low latency to match production speeds, despite evolving lighting, part geometries, and surface conditions. To meet these needs, we propose LAECIPS, a large vision model-assisted adaptive edge-cloud collaboration framework for IoT-based embodied intelligence systems. LAECIPS decouples large vision models in the cloud from lightweight models on the edge, enabling plug-and-play model adaptation and continual learning. Through a hard input mining-based inference strategy, LAECIPS routes complex and uncertain inspection cases to the cloud while handling routine tasks at the edge, achieving both high accuracy and low latency. Experiments conducted on a real-world robotic semantic segmentation system for visual inspection demonstrate significant improvements in accuracy, processing latency, and communication overhead compared to state-of-the-art methods. LAECIPS provides a practical and scalable foundation for embodied intelligence in smart manufacturing, especially in adaptive robotic inspection and quality control scenarios.