Digital-Twin-Guided Navigation Architecture for Adaptive Matrix Worms: Tether-Mediated Coordination and Supplemental Sensing in Mapped Compliant Infrastructure

The Adaptive Matrix Worm (AMW) navigates inside a known Adaptive Matrix Ecosystem (AME) Internal Plumbing System (IPS) under tether-mediated depot command, not by autonomous blind navigation through unknown terrain. This paper specifies a navigation architecture in which route planning is externalised to the AME digital twin and the depot controller, the primary navigation substrate is the yellow fiber-optic cable that connects depot to the agent's sensor tip, the primary supplement is spotlight-assisted visual confirmation through transparent Natural Rubber Latex (NRL) tubing, and onboard embodied sensing (proprioception, an artificial-lateral-line flow-anomaly detector, and an experimental electroreception analog) is relegated to junction-level disambiguation, anomaly detection, and graceful degradation under partial failure. The hierarchy inversion from earlier drafts of this canonical is the central pivot: practical engineering experience in pipeline crawlers, medical endoscopy, and tethered subsea ROV systems is that exotic local sensing does not earn its place when prior map, tether telemetry, and visual access are available, and the AMW has all three. We develop the digital-twin route-graph primitive, the fiber-optic command/telemetry layer with Fiber Bragg grating (FBG) shape sensing along the yellow cable, the visual layer through transparent NRL, the supplemental sensing stack as fallback and disambiguation tools, and the cross-modality failure-cascade catalogue that explains how a tethered, mapped, visually inspectable AMW can degrade gracefully rather than fail catastrophically when one navigation layer becomes unreliable. Bench Loop G, the Localisation Cell, is the bench-scale instrument that maps to Stages 1–3 of the canonical's five-stage staged-validation pathway and that would falsify the navigation architecture or identify the boundary at which it fails. The paper's least obvious contribution is the failure-cascade logic itself: supplemental sensing matters in a tethered, mapped system not because primary navigation is insufficient but because real infrastructure fails locally, deforms, leaks, clouds, snags, occludes, and diverges from its digital twin, and graceful degradation requires more than one pillar.