Multimodal Adaptive Control for Safe Robotic Craniotomy Under Partial Observability

Xiao Zhang; Jiaxuan Li; Renzhen Le; Di Wu; Chao Sun; Jiachen Zhu; Haoyuan Zhang; Xiang Li; Jian Liu; Zhenzhi Ying; Pengfei Zhang; Liming Shu

arXiv · 2607.21113

Multimodal Adaptive Control for Safe Robotic Craniotomy Under Partial Observability

Xiao Zhang·Jiaxuan Li·Renzhen Le·Di Wu·Chao Sun·Jiachen Zhu·Haoyuan Zhang·Xiang Li·Jian Liu·Zhenzhi Ying·Pengfei Zhang·Liming Shu

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Abstract

Autonomous robotic craniotomy requires continuous regulation of tool-tissue interactions to mitigate mechanical overload and thermal damage while maintaining surgical efficiency. However, this process is inherently partially observable due to unknown, time-varying tissue properties and the inability to directly measure cutting temperatures under physical occlusion. To address these challenges, we propose RL-MACRO, a cybernetic closed-loop intelligence framework that couples multimodal perception, adaptive decision-making, and robotic execution. This framework empowers the surgical robot to autonomously perceive inaccessible states from partial sensory feedback and dynamically optimize its behaviors under uncertain environment. A CNN-LSTM observer first fuses force and sound feedback to reconstruct the hidden temperature state (R^2=0.939, MAE = 1.717 deg C). This reconstructed temperature, alongside multi-sensor features, forms the belief state for an offline Implicit Q-Learning (IQL) policy. A novel dual-head Actor dynamically coordinates the feed rate, spindle speed, and cutting depth to optimize efficiency within strict safety bounds. These decisions are seamlessly translated into spatial motions via online trajectory re-planning and velocity servoing. Experiments on bovine ribs and six ex vivo goat skulls validate the system's robust perception, adaptive recovery from force/temperature excursions, and smooth execution on irregular surfaces, establishing a data-driven cybernetic paradigm for safe and efficient autonomous bone cutting.

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Xiao Zhang, Jiaxuan Li, Renzhen Le, Di Wu, Chao Sun, Jiachen Zhu, Haoyuan Zhang, Xiang Li, Jian Liu, Zhenzhi Ying, Pengfei Zhang, Liming Shu. 2026-08-19. Multimodal Adaptive Control for Safe Robotic Craniotomy Under Partial Observability. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.21113

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