English

MicroPush: A Simulator and Benchmark for Contact-Rich Cell Pushing and Assembly with a Magnetic Rolling Microrobot

Robotics 2026-03-02 v1 Systems and Control Systems and Control

Abstract

Magnetic rolling microrobots enable gentle manipulation in confined microfluidic environments, yet autonomy for contact-rich behaviors such as cell pushing and multi-target assembly remains difficult to develop and evaluate reproducibly. We present MicroPush, an open-source simulator and benchmark suite for magnetic rolling microrobots in cluttered 2D scenes. MicroPush combines an overdamped interaction model with contact-aware stick--slip effects, lightweight near-field damping, optional Poiseuille background flow, and a calibrated mapping from actuation frequency to free-space rolling speed. On top of the simulator core, we provide a modular planning--control stack with a two-phase strategy for contact establishment and goal-directed pushing, together with a deterministic benchmark protocol with fixed tasks, staged execution, and unified CSV logging for single-object transport and hexagonal assembly. We report success, time, and tracking metrics, and an actuation-variation measure EΔωE_{\Delta\omega}. Results show that controller stability dominates performance under flow disturbances, while planner choice can influence command smoothness over long-horizon sequences via waypoint progression. MicroPush enables reproducible comparison and ablation of planning, control, and learning methods for microscale contact-rich micromanipulation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.23607,
  title  = {MicroPush: A Simulator and Benchmark for Contact-Rich Cell Pushing and Assembly with a Magnetic Rolling Microrobot},
  author = {Yanda Yang and Sambeeta Das},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.23607},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

13 pages, 8 figures