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Cell motility in higher organisms (eukaryotes) is crucial to biological functions ranging from wound healing to immune response, and also implicated in diseases such as cancer. For cells crawling on hard surfaces, significant insights into…
Conventional soft pneumatic actuators, typically based on hollow elastomeric chambers, often suffer from small structural support and require costly geometry-specific redesigns for multimodal functionality. Porous materials such as foam,…
The process of self-morphing in curved surfaces found in nature, such as with the growth of flowers and leaves, has generated interest in the study of self-morphing bilayers, which has been used in many soft robots or switchers. However,…
Using a Cauchy integral formulation of the boundary integral equations, we simulate the erosion a porous medium comprised of up to 100 solid bodies embedded in a Stokes flow. The grains of the medium are resolved individually and erode…
Recent research has shown that motile cells can adapt their mode of propulsion depending on the environment in which they find themselves. One mode is swimming by blebbing or other shape changes, and in this paper we analyze a class of…
Legged robots face significant challenges in moving and navigating on deformable and highly yielding terrain such as mud. We present a resistive force model for legged foot-mud interactions. The model captures rheological behaviors such as…
Exploring bodies of water on their surface allows robots to efficiently communicate and harvest energy from the sun. On the water surface, however, robots often face highly unstructured environments, cluttered with plant matter, animals,…
We investigate the effect of an anisotropic substrate on the turbulent dynamics of a simulated two dimensional active nematic. This is introduced as an anisotropic friction and an effective anisotropic viscosity, with the orientation of the…
Locally broken symmetries are used across fields to transport matter, particles and information in preferential directions. Beyond local mechanisms, spatially distributed nonlinearities in crystalline media have enabled non-reciprocal…
Robotic arms mounted on spacecraft, known as space manipulator systems (SMSs), are critical for enabling on-orbit assembly, satellite servicing, and debris removal. However, controlling these systems in microgravity remains a significant…
The physics of behavior seeks simple descriptions of animal behavior. The field has advanced rapidly by using techniques in low dimensional dynamics distilled from computer vision. Yet, we still do not generally understand the rules which…
The displacement of a fluid by another less viscous one in a quasi-two dimensional geometry typically leads to complex fingering patterns. In an isotropic system, dense-branching growth arises, which is characterized by repeated…
Understanding swimming in soft yielding media is challenging due to their complex deformation response to the swimmer's motion. We experimentally show that a scallop-inspired swimmer with reciprocally flapping wings generates locomotion in…
Active particles often swim in confined environments. The transport mechanisms, especially the global one as reflected by the Taylor dispersion model, are of great practical interest to various applications. For active dispersion process in…
Soft robots offer a frontier in robotics with enormous potential for safe human-robot interaction and agility in uncertain environments. A stepping stone towards unlocking their potential is a control theory tailored to soft robotics,…
Celestial bodies such as the Moon and Mars are mainly covered by loose, granular soil, a notoriously challenging terrain to traverse with (wheeled) robotic systems. Here, we present experimental work on traversing steep, granular slopes…
The drag acting on an intruder in a three-dimensional frictionless dry granular environment is numerically studied. It is found the followings: (i) There is no yield force for the motion of the intruder without the gravity. (ii) The drag is…
We derive the long-time dynamics of a tracer immersed in a one-dimensional active bath. In contrast to previous studies, we find that the damping and noise correlations possess long-time tails with exponents that depend on the tracer…
This paper presents AquaMILR+, an untethered limbless robot designed for agile navigation in complex aquatic environments. The robot features a bilateral actuation mechanism that models musculoskeletal actuation in many anguilliform…
We deal with stochastic network simulations in a model with three distinct species that compete under cyclic rules which are similar to the rules of the popular rock-paper-scissors game. We investigate the Hamming distance density and then…