Streamlining stereo differentiable rendering for marker-free real-time tracking of surgical robots

Published July 15, 2026 · Category: Robotics

Overview

arXiv:2607.12604v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Purpose: Marker-based tracking of surgical robots is occlusion-prone in cluttered operating rooms. We evaluate stereo differentiable rendering for marker-free, real-time robot pose tracking, potentially improving safety, reducing setup time, and enabling multi-robot interaction. Methods: We extend the markerless pose estimation framework roboreg to online dynamic tracking via (i) sequential optimisation that propagates pose estimates across frames with motion-adaptive hyperparameter tuning, and (ii) CUDA stream parallelisation of segmentation and optimisation, combined with CUDA-graph accelerated segmentation. We evaluate on 38 unobstructed and 5 occluded displacement sequences with static start/end ground-truth calibrations and dynamic marker-based reference tracking. Results: We achieve real-time 1080p tracking at 30 fps (up from 14 fps for vanilla roboreg), matching the camera frame rate. Accuracy reaches 1.7 cm / 0.6 deg against static ground truth and 1.2 cm mean 3D error over 27,460 frames against the marker-based reference (1.53 cm over 1,242 occluded frames). Our method outperforms FoundationPose by 11% in dynamic estimation (63% under occlusion) and 250% in static estimation, with 6x faster inference. Conclusions: Stereo differentiable rendering enables real-time, high-resolution marker-free surgical robot tracking, on par with marker-based approaches and surpassing foundation-model baselines.

Source

Originally published at arxiv.org.

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