Related papers: Optimally swimming Stokesian robots
Stokesian Dynamics is a well-established computational method for simulating dynamics of many particles suspended in a conventional passive fluid medium. Active fluids composed of self-propelling particles with broken time reversal symmetry…
The paper carries on our previous investigations on the complementary version of Purcell's rotator: a low-Reynolds-number swimmer composed of three balls of equal radii. In the asymptotic regime of very long arms, the Stokes induced…
Fish-inspired aquatic robots are gaining increasing attention in marine robot communities due to their high swimming speeds and efficient propulsion enabled by flexible bodies that generate undulatory motions. To support the design…
In a canonical Stokes flow geometry, the Hele-Shaw cell, we show that tunable circulations induced by Lorentz forces in a conducting fluid enable particle control. We reveal that energy-optimal control paths correspond to geodesics of an…
Helical propulsion is used by many microorganisms to swim in viscous-dominated environments. Their swimming dynamics are relatively well understood, but detailed study of the flow fields and actuation mechanisms are still needed to realize…
Both natural and artificial small-scale swimmers may often self-propel in environments subject to complex geometrical constraints. While most past theoretical work on low-Reynolds number locomotion addressed idealised geometrical…
The collective swimming of soft robots in an infinite viscous fluid is an emergent phenomenon due to the non-reciprocal hydrodynamic interactions between individual swimmers. These physical interactions give rise to unique spatiotemporal…
We introduce and investigate the wellposedness of two models describing the self-propelled motion of a "small bio-mimetic swimmer" in the 2D and 3D incompressible fluids modeled by the Navier-Stokes equations. It is assumed that the…
Torque-driven microscale swimming robots, or microrotors, hold significant potential in biomedical applications such as targeted drug delivery, minimally invasive surgery, and micromanipulation. This paper addresses the challenge of…
An axisymmetric squirmer in a Bingham viscoplastic fluid is studied numerically to determine the effect of a yield stress environment on locomotion. The nonlinearity of the governing equations necessitates numerical methods, which is…
By synergistically combining modeling, simulation and experiments, we show that there exists a regime of self-propulsion in which the inertia in the fluid dynamics can be separated from that of the swimmer. This is demonstrated by the…
Matching the swimming efficiency and agility of fish has remained an elusive goal in underwater robotics. Such locomotion capabilities rely on complex vortex interactions between the robot's body and the surrounding fluid. However,…
We study the 6-dimensional dynamics -- position and orientation -- of a large sphere advected by a turbulent flow. The movement of the sphere is recorded with 2 high-speed cameras. Its orientation is tracked using a novel, efficient…
Humanoid robots are machines built with an anthropomorphic shape. Despite decades of research into the subject, it is still challenging to tackle the robot locomotion problem from an algorithmic point of view. For example, these machines…
We report experimental measurements of the translational and rotational dynamics of a large buoyant sphere in isotropic turbulence. We introduce an efficient method to simultaneously determine the position and (absolute) orientation of a…
We introduce a measure for energetic efficiency of biological cilia acting individually or collectively and numerically determine the optimal beating patterns according to this criterion. Maximizing the efficiency of a single cilium leads…
Motivated by recent simulations and by experiments on aggregation of gliding bacteria, we study a model of the collective dynamics of self-propelled hard rods on a substrate in two dimensions. The rods have finite size, interact via…
We combine a general formulation of microswimmmer equations of motion with a numerical bead-shell model to calculate the hydrodynamic interactions with the fluid, from which the swimming speed, power and efficiency are extracted. From this…
When swimming at low Reynolds numbers, inertial effects are negligible and reciprocal movements cannot induce net motion. Instead, symmetry breaking is necessary to achieve net propulsion. Directed swimming can be supported by magnetic…
Locomotion is typically studied either in continuous media where bodies and legs experience forces generated by the flowing medium, or on solid substrates dominated by friction. In the former, centralized coordination is believed to…