Related papers: Towards Physarum Engines
How do non-neural organisms, such as the slime mould \textit{Physarum polycephalum}, anticipate periodic events in their environment? We present a minimal, biologically inspired reservoir model that demonstrates simple temporal anticipation…
Soft slender structures are ubiquitous in natural and artificial systems and can be observed at scales that range from the nanometric to the kilometric, from polymers to space tethers. We present a practical numerical approach to simulate…
Limbless creatures can crawl on flat surfaces by deforming their bodies and interacting with asperities on the ground, offering a biological blueprint for designing efficient limbless robots. Inspired by this natural locomotion, we present…
Dynamically tunable surface textures offer a powerful route to spatiotemporally regulate surface and interfacial properties, enabling emerging applications ranging from adaptive optics to soft robotic manipulation. However, achieving…
Machines designed for operation in Space, as well as other extreme environments, need to be both resilient and adaptable when mission parameters change. Soft robots offer advantages in adaptability, but most lack resilience to the pressure…
The cytoskeleton is an important subsystem of cells that is involved for example in cell division and locomotion. It consists of filaments that are cross-linked by molecular motors that can induce relative sliding between filaments and…
Plasmonic Optical matter (OM), composed of optically bound metallic particles, can be rotated by transferring the spin angular momentum (SAM) of chiral light to the assembly. Rotating OM is a promising platform for optical micromachines,…
Biological locomotion in nature is often achieved by the interaction between a flexible body and its surrounding medium. The interaction of a flexible body with granular media is less understood compared with viscous fluids partially due to…
We have developed an efficient simulation tool 'GOLLUM' for the computation of electrical, spin and thermal transport characteristics of complex nanostructures. The new multi-scale, multi-terminal tool addresses a number of new challenges…
Lateral Inhibition (LI) phenomena occur in a wide range of sensory modalities and are most famously described in the human visual system. In LI the activity of a stimulated neuron is itself excited and suppresses the activity of its local…
For a wide range of modern soft functional materials the selective transport of sub-nanometer-sized molecules (`penetrants') through a stimuli-responsive polymeric membrane is key to the desired function. In this study, we investigate the…
While the collective motion of active particles has been studied extensively, effective strategies to navigate particle swarms without external guidance remain elusive. We introduce a method to control the trajectories of two-dimensional…
Magnetic skyrmions are particle-like objects with topologically-protected stability which can be set into motion with an applied current. Using a particle-based model we simulate current-driven magnetic skyrmions interacting with random…
Microscopic robots could perform tasks with high spatial precision, such as acting in biological tissues on the scale of individual cells, provided they can reach precise locations. This paper evaluates the feasibility of in vivo locomotion…
Simple models of interacting spins play an important role in physics. They capture the properties of many magnetic materials, but also extend to other systems, such as bosons and fermions in a lattice, systems with gauge fields, high-Tc…
The development of novel texture adaptations for the management of swallowing disorders could be accelerated if reliable in vitro tests were made available. This study addresses some of the limitations of swallowing in vitro models, by…
Electrically-driven soft robots based on piezoelectric actuators may enable compact form factors and maneuverability in complex environments. In most prior work, piezoelectric actuators are used to control a single degree of freedom. In…
We model analytically the dynamics of a cytoskeletal filament in a motility assay. The filament is described as rigid rod free to slide in two dimensions. The motor proteins consist of polymeric tails tethered to the plane and modeled as…
We study a slender filament beating in a viscous fluid with novel curvature-dependent bending stiffness. Our numerical and experimental investigations reveal that such differential stiffness can sustain planar bending waves far along…
We explore the locomotion of soft robots in granular medium (GM) resulting from the elastic deformation of slender rods. A low-cost, rapidly fabricable robot inspired by the physiological structure of bacteria is presented. It consists of a…