Related papers: Undulatory Locomotion
The biological fluids encountered by self-propelled cells display complex microstructures and rheology. We consider here the general problem of low-Reynolds number locomotion in a complex fluid. {Building on classical work on the transport…
Microorganisms are rarely found in Nature swimming freely in an unbounded fluid. Instead, they typically encounter other organisms, hard walls, or deformable boundaries such as free interfaces or membranes. Hydrodynamic interactions between…
Many animals and robots move using undulatory motion of their bodies. When in close proximity undulatory motion can lead to novel collective behaviors such as gait synchronization, spatial reconfiguration, and clustering. Here we study the…
Natural swimmers usually perform undulations to propel themselves and perform a range of maneuvers. These include various biological species ranging from micro-sized organisms to large-sized fishes that undulate at typical kinematic…
Fishes, cetaceans, and many other aquatic vertebrates undulate their bodies to propel themselves through water. Swimming requires an intricate interplay between sensing the environment, making decisions, controlling internal dynamics, and…
Limbless organisms of all sizes use undulating patterns of self-deformation to locomote. Geometric mechanics, which maps deformations to motions, provides a powerful framework to formalize and investigate the theoretical properties and…
Swimming, i.e., being able to advance in the absence of external forces by performing cyclic shape changes, is particularly demanding at low Reynolds numbers which is the regime of interest for micro-organisms and micro-robots. We focus on…
Depending on multiple parameters, soft robots can exhibit different modes of locomotion that are difficult to model numerically. As a result, improving their performance is complex, especially in small-scale systems characterized by low…
Organisms that locomote by propagating waves of body bending can maintain performance across heterogeneous environments by modifying their gait frequency $\omega$ or wavenumber $k$. We identify a unifying relationship between these…
The locomotion of microorganisms in fluids is ubiquitous and plays an important role in numerous biological processes. In this chapter we present an overview of theoretical modeling for low-Reynolds-number locomotion.
Bioinspired snake robotics has been a highly active area of research over the years and resulted in many prototypes. Much of these prototypes takes the form of serially jointed-rigid bodies. The emergence of soft robotics contributed to a…
Micro-organisms propel themselves in viscous environments by the periodic, nonreciprocal beating of slender appendages known as flagella. Active materials have been widely exploited to mimic this form of locomotion. However, the realization…
We discuss the scaling laws for the flow generated in a viscous fluid by a wave propagating along a solid boundary. This has applications to the displacement of tiny objects on solids, under the effect of progressive surface waves and for…
Microscale propulsion is integral to numerous biomedical systems, for example biofilm formation and human reproduction, where the surrounding fluids comprise suspensions of polymers. These polymers endow the fluid with non-Newtonian…
Sand is a highly dissipative system, where the local spatial arrangements and densities depend strongly on the applied forces, resulting in fluid-like or solid-like behaviour. This makes sand swimming challenging and intriguing, raising…
Locomotion by shape changes (spermatozoon swimming, snake slithering, bird flapping) or gas expulsion (rocket firing) is assumed to require environmental interaction, due to conservation of momentum. As first noted in (Wisdom, 2003) and…
Unicellular microscopic organisms living in aqueous environments outnumber all other creatures on Earth. A large proportion of them are able to self-propel in fluids with a vast diversity of swimming gaits and motility patterns. In this…
Here we introduce a two-dimensional (2D) low-Reynolds swimmer and discuss the motion of the swimmer both in noise-free and stochastic regimes. Three spheres, linked by extensible arms, in a plane form the triangle body of micro-swimmer.…
In this paper, we address a crucial point regarding the description of moderate to high Reynolds numbers aquatic swimmers. For decades, swimming animals have been classified in two different families of propulsive mechanisms based on the…
The self-propelled motion of microscopic bodies immersed in a fluid medium is studied using molecular dynamics simulation. The advantage of the atomistic approach is that the detailed level of description allows complete freedom in…