Adding a depth channel rarely yields a massive performance gain, likely due to data scarcity and the fact that modern VLAs are good at guessing distance directly from RGB. I have used multiple RGB-D cameras, but it is hard to get stable images without jitter. Depth can still be useful for high-level reasoning. PI also uses bounding-box or segmentation data from PI-05 for that.

PI smartly combined discretized tokens with flow-matching for efficient training, and it works well in most cases. Still, end-effector representation may be better for teleop with devices like a SpaceMouse, VR, or VibeTracker. PI-07 also supports EEF, but I am not sure how much data is needed to fine-tune PI-05 for that.

I'd suggest starting with the default pi05 model. Data strategy is probably more important than model improvements. Since VLA performance is highly dependent on the data/action distribution and it's easy to modify. After that, you can add high-level reasoning like PI05. I visited a Chinese VLA company that already adopted the PI-05 approach, and it works quite well in practice.