Related papers: Self-assisted Amoeboid Navigation in Complex Envir…
Cell biomechanics involve a great number of complex phenomena that are fundamental to the evolution of life itself and other associated processes, ranging from the very early stages of embryo-genesis to the maintenance of damaged structures…
Animal navigation research posits that organisms build and maintain internal spatial representations, or maps, of their environment. We ask if machines -- specifically, artificial intelligence (AI) navigation agents -- also build implicit…
The use of needles to access sites within organs is fundamental to many interventional medical procedures both for diagnosis and treatment. Safe and accurate navigation of a needle through living tissue to an intra-tissue target is…
Bio-inspired design is often used in autonomous UAV navigation due to the capacity of biological systems for flight and obstacle avoidance despite limited sensory and computational capabilities. In particular, honeybees mainly use the…
The integration of motile cells into biohybrid microrobots offers unique properties such as sensitive responses to external stimuli, resilience, and intrinsic energy supply. Here we study biohybrid microtransporters that are driven by…
Cell migration is essential for regulating many biological processes in physiological or pathological conditions, including embryonic development and cancer invasion. In vitro and in silico studies suggest that collective cell migration is…
Through evolution, bacteria have developed the ability to perform chemotactic motion in order to find nourishment. By adopting a machine learning approach, we aim to understand how this behavior arises. We consider run-and-tumble agents…
Self-propulsion and navigation due to the sensing of environmental conditions - such as durotaxis and chemotaxis - are remarkable properties of biological cells that cannot be reproduced by single-component self-propelled particles. We…
The response of microbes to external signals is mediated by biochemical networks with intrinsic time scales. These time scales give rise to a memory that impacts cellular behaviour. Here we study theoretically the role of cellular memory in…
Chemotaxis and auto-chemotaxis play an important role in many essential biological processes. We present a self-propelling artificial swimmer system which exhibits chemotaxis as well as negative auto-chemotaxis. Oil droplets in an aqueous…
Multicellular collective migration is a ubiquitous strategy of cells to translocate spatially in diverse tissue environments to accomplish a wide variety of biological phenomena, viz. embryonic development, wound healing, and tumor…
Spatial reasoning in partially observable environments has often been approached through passive predictive models, yet theories of embodied cognition suggest that genuinely useful representations arise only when perception is tightly…
Achieving fully autonomous exploration and navigation remains a critical challenge in robotics, requiring integrated solutions for localisation, mapping, decision-making and motion planning. Existing approaches either rely on strict…
In vivo, eukaryotic cells are embedded in a matrix environment, where they grow and develop. Generally, this extracellular matrix (ECM) is an anisotropic fibrous structure, through which macromolecules and biochemical signaling molecules at…
The research field of Artificial Life studies how life-like phenomena such as autopoiesis, agency, or self-regulation can self-organize in computer simulations. In cellular automata (CA), a key open-question has been whether it it is…
Navigating through unstructured environments is a basic capability of intelligent creatures, and thus is of fundamental interest in the study and development of artificial intelligence. Long-range navigation is a complex cognitive task that…
Self-generated gradients (SGG) provide robust steering cues that guide cells in their long-distance expeditions during embryonic development, immune response, and cancer metastasis. Cells generate their own local, dynamic gradients by…
The extracellular matrix (ECM) is a highly complex structure through which biochemical and mechanical signals are transmitted. In processes of cell migration, the ECM also acts as a scaffold, providing structural support to cells as well as…
Motility is a fundamental survival strategy of bacteria to navigate porous environments. Swimming cells thrive in quiescent wetlands and sediments at the bottom of the marine water column, where they mediate many essential biogeochemical…
Adaptability is central to autonomy. Intuitively, for high-dimensional learning problems such as navigating based on vision, internal models with higher complexity allow to accurately encode the information available. However, most learning…