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The ability to modify morphology in response to environmental changes represents a highly advantageous feature in biological organisms, facilitating their adaptation to diverse environmental conditions. While some robots have the capability…
Symmetry is a central organizing principle in natural systems, yet its use as a unifying design strategy in robotics has largely remained limited to geometric form. We show that symmetry can instead be leveraged at the level of dynamic…
Recent research has shown that motile cells can adapt their mode of propulsion to the mechanical properties of the environment in which they find themselves--crawling in some environments while swimming in others. The latter can involve…
Interests in exploration of new energy resources are increasing due to the exhaustion of existing resources. To explore new energy sources, various studies have been conducted to improve the drilling performance of drilling equipment for…
This paper addresses the challenge of autonomous excavation of challenging terrains, in particular those that are prone to jamming and inter-particle adhesion when tackled by a standard penetrate-drag-scoop motion pattern. Inspired by human…
Undulatory locomotion is a means of self-propulsion that relies on the generation and propagation of waves along a body. As a mode of locomotion it is primitive and relatively simple, yet can be remarkably robust. No wonder then, that it is…
Many swimmers, especially small to medium-sized animals, use intermittent locomotion that differs from continuous swimming of large species. This type of locomotion, called burst-and-coast, is often associated with an energetic advantage.…
Cells and organisms follow aligned structures in their environment, a process that can generate persistent migration paths. Kinetic transport equations are a popular modelling tool for describing biological movements at the mesoscopic…
Active fluid transport is a hallmark of many biological transport networks. While animal circulatory systems generally rely on a single heart to drive flows, other organisms employ decentralized local pumps to distribute fluids and…
An important class of fluid-structure problems involve the dynamics of ordered arrays of immersed, flexible fibers. While specialized numerical methods have been developed to study fluid-fiber systems, they become infeasible when there are…
Swimming cells and microorganisms must often move though complex fluids that contain an immersed microstructure such as polymer molecules, or filaments. In many important biological processes, such as mammalian reproduction and bacterial…
We study the 2D motion of colloidal dimers by single-particle tracking and compare the experimental observations obtained by bright-field microscopy to theoretical predictions for anisotropic diffusion. The comparison is based on the…
Flagellar-driven locomotion plays a critical role in bacterial attachment and colonization of surfaces, contributing to the risks of contamination and infection. Tremendous attempts to uncover the underlying principles governing bacterial…
Marine exploration is essential to understanding ocean processes and organisms. While the use of current unmanned underwater vehicles has enabled many discoveries, there are still plenty of limitations toward exploring complex environments.…
Shape anisotropy of individual building blocks plays a crucial role in creating exotic structures and controlling phase behavior in equilibrium systems. We present a combined experimental and simulation study in which we used light-driven…
The accumulation of swimming bacteria near surfaces may lead to biological processes such as biofilm formation and wound infection. Previous experimental observations of Vibrio alginolyticus showed an interesting correlation between the…
Cell crawling requires the generation of intracellular forces by the cytoskeleton and their transmission to an extracellular substrate through specific adhesion molecules. Crawling cells show many features of excitable systems, such as…
Decision-making is the process of selecting an action among alternatives, allowing biological and artificial systems to navigate complex environments and optimize behavior. While neural systems rely on neuron-based sensory processing and…
While cell crawling on a solid surface is relatively well understood, and relies on substrate adhesion, some cells can also swim in the bulk, through mechanisms that are still largely unclear. Here, we propose a minimal model for in-bulk…
A remarkable variety of organisms use metachronal coordination (i.e., numerous neighboring appendages beating sequentially with a fixed phase lag) to swim or pump fluid. This coordination strategy is used by microorganisms to break symmetry…