Industry Monitor Humanoid Industrial & Cobot AGV / AMR Quadruped Reducers · Servos · Sensors Drones & Autonomy Embodied AI
Robos News
Robotics

Preview-Based Relative-Motion Control of an Insertion Tool for Neural-Thread Placement in Pulsating Tissue

arXiv:2608.08860v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic neural-thread placement requires regulating the insertion-tool tip relative to tissue that moves with cardiac and respiratory pulsation. This paper develops a preview-based relative-motion controller that estimates latency-delayed periodic surface motion, predicts it over a short horizon, and uses offset-free model predictive control to regulate relative placement while limiting actuator effort and lateral relative velocity. In MuJoCo, t

Published August 11, 2026 · Category: Robotics

Overview

arXiv:2608.08860v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic neural-thread placement requires regulating the insertion-tool tip relative to tissue that moves with cardiac and respiratory pulsation. This paper develops a preview-based relative-motion controller that estimates latency-delayed periodic surface motion, predicts it over a short horizon, and uses offset-free model predictive control to regulate relative placement while limiting actuator effort and lateral relative velocity. In MuJoCo, the 1-DOF controller achieves 12.0\um\ free-space and 1.9\um\ contact RMS relative-placement error, versus 18.3/176.8\um\ for delayed-feedback impedance and 286.1/275.5\um\ for lab-frame PD, at the cost of higher peak contact force (3.43 versus 2.00~mN) since offset-free tracking drives the tip fully to the commanded depth rather than yielding against the tissue. In 3 DOF, coupled preview reduces contact lateral shear from 1.34 to 0.50~mm/s with 2.1\um\ lateral RMS error. A feasibility-restored octagonal shear formulation keeps the QP solvable under degraded sensing by adding a bounded shared slack: at 10\um\ RMS per-axis sensing noise, where a matched cost-only controller violates the 0.80~mm/s budget in all 10 seeds (mean/maximum 0.988/1.175~mm/s), the soft-octagon controller completes all 10 seeds with no fallback and no measured violation (0.653/0.712~mm/s), with its operating envelope characterized up to 15\um\ RMS. A two-vertex Lyapunov certificate for the controller's actual finite-horizon error-feedback gain holds over $-40\%/{+}50\%$ reflected-mass mismatch. The modeled tip is a rigid contact point, and the study is simulation-only: flexible-thread and carrier-needle mechanics, a validated transient-force constraint, biological damage thresholds, and hardware-realistic sensing and timing remain required before deployment.

Source

Originally published at arxiv.org.

Related Articles

Robos News Newsroom

Robos News reports on robotics research, components, manufacturers, field deployments, and industrial automation worldwide. Tip our newsroom: [email protected]

Email the newsroom →
Reporting standard: Product specifications, deployment counts, and performance claims are attributed to their source. Safety-critical decisions should be based on the applicable technical documentation and validation for the operating environment.
More from News →