Related papers: Chemical Power for Microscopic Robots in Capillari…
Cooperation and competition among stand-alone swarm agents increase collective fitness of the whole system. A principally new kind of collective systems is demonstrated by some bacteria and fungi, when they build symbiotic organisms.…
Monodisperse lipid-coated microbubbles are a promising route to unlock the full potential of ultrasound contrast agents for medical diagnosis and therapy. Here, we present a stand-alone lab-on-a-chip instrument that allows microbubbles to…
Capillarity-driven self-assembly at fluidic interfaces offers a scalable route to large, reconfigurable materials. Microscale particles with high horizontal-to-vertical aspect ratios become attractive building blocks for shape-directed…
Taking inspiration from the crawling motion of biological cells on a substrate, we consider a physical model of self-propulsion where the spatio-temporal driving can involve both, a mechanical actuation by active force couples, and a…
In the field of distributed computing by robot swarms, the research comprehends manifold models where robots operate in the Euclidean plane through a sequence of look-compute-move cycles. Models under study differ for (i) the possibility of…
An oxidation process is simulated for a bundle of metal tubes in a cross-flow. A fluid flow is governed by the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. To describe the transport of oxygen, the corresponding convection-diffusion equation is…
A computational model is developed to assist the design of the first hybrid rocket engine of the McGill Rocket Team, using liquid nitrous oxide as an oxidizer and solid paraffin wax as a fuel. The model is developed in three phases: In the…
Humanoid robotics research depends on capable robot platforms, but recently developed advanced platforms are often not available to other research groups, expensive, dangerous to operate, or closed-source. The lack of available platforms…
We show using molecular dynamics simulation that spatial confinement of water inside carbon nanotubes (CNT) substantially increases its boiling temperature and that a small temperature growth above the boiling point dramatically raises the…
Colloidosomes are created in the laboratory from a Pickering emulsion of water droplets in oil. The colloidosomes have approximately the same diameter and by choosing (hairy) particles of different diameters it is possible to control the…
Collective control of mobile microrobotic swarms is indispensable for their potential high-impact applications in targeted drug delivery, medical diagnostics, parallel micromanipulation, and environmental sensing and remediation. Lack of…
A major role of robots is to assist in assembly by moving building blocks and by exerting forces, e.g. to snap parts together. At the molecular scale, diffusive transport and thermal forces permit self-assembly, and molecular robots can…
Conducting submicron particles are well-suited as filler particles in non-conducting polymer matrices to obtain a conducting composite with a low percolation threshold. Going to nanometer-sized filler particles imposes a restriction to the…
Like their larger micron-scale counterparts, {\AA}ngstr\"om-scale chemically self-propelled motors use asymmetric catalytic activity to produce self-generated concentration gradients that lead to directed motion. Unlike their micron-scale…
Microrobots show great potential in biomedical applications such as drug delivery and cell manipulations. However, current microrobots are mostly fabricated as a single entity and type and the tasks they can perform are limited. In this…
The use of autonomous robots for assistance tasks in hospitals has the potential to free up qualified staff and im-prove patient care. However, the ubiquity of deformable and transparent objects in hospital settings poses signif-icant…
Capillary droplets form due to surface tension when two immiscible fluids are mixed. We describe the motion of gravity-driven capillary droplets flowing through narrow constrictions and obstacle arrays in both simulations and experiments.…
Supercapacitors are electric devices able to deliver a large power, enabling their use e.g. for the recovery of breaking energy in cars. This is achieved by using two carbon electrodes and an electrolyte solution or a pure ionic liquid…
The collective behavior of chemically propelled sphere-dimer motors made from linked catalytic and noncatalytic spheres in a quasi-two-dimensional confined geometry is studied using a coarse-grained microscopic dynamical model. Chemical…
Recent theoretical research on the fundamentals of statistical mechanics has led to a remarkable discovery [2-4]: with a locally nonchaotic energy barrier, a macroscopic system may produce useful work in a cycle by absorbing heat from a…