Related papers: Emergence of the advancing neuromechanical phase i…
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…
Undulatory locomotion is ubiquitous in nature and observed in different media, from the swimming of flagellated microorganisms in biological fluids, to the slithering of snakes on land, or the locomotion of sandfish lizards in sand. Despite…
Undulatory swimming is a widespread propulsion strategy adopted by many small-scale organisms including various single-cell eukaryotes and nematodes. In this work, we report a comprehensive study of undulatory locomotion of a finite…
Self-propelling organisms locomote via generation of patterns of self-deformation. Despite the diversity of body plans, internal actuation schemes and environments in limbless vertebrates and invertebrates, such organisms often use similar…
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…
For nearly a century, researchers have tried to understand the swimming of aquatic animals in terms of a balance between the forward thrust from swimming movements and drag on the body. Prior approaches have failed to provide a separation…
We use high-speed x-ray imaging to reveal how a small (~10cm) desert dwelling lizard, the sandfish (Scincus scincus), swims within a granular medium [1]. On the surface, the lizard uses a standard diagonal gait, but once below the surface,…
Dissipative environments are ubiquitous in nature, from microscopic swimmers in low-Reynolds-number fluids to macroscopic animals in frictional media. In this study, motivated by various behaviours of {\it Caenorhabditis elegans} during…
In undulatory swimming of fish, muscles contract sequentially along the body to generate a bending wave that pushes against the water and produces thrust. Here, we use a 3D computational fluid dynamics model coupled to the motion of the…
Undulatory locomotion is common to nematodes as well as to limbless vertebrates, but its control is not understood in spite of the identification of hundred of genes involved in Caenorhabditis elegans locomotion. To reveal the mechanisms of…
The current study presents a systematic investigation of the locomotion performance of a swimmer with a wide range of parameter settings. Two-dimensional simulations with the immersed boundary method are employed for the fluid-structure…
Many animals and robots move using undulatory motion of their bodies. When in close proximity undulatory motion can lead to novel collective behaviors such as gait synchronization, spatial reconfiguration, and clustering. Here we study the…
Sand is a highly dissipative system, where the local spatial arrangements and densities depend strongly on the applied forces, resulting in fluid-like or solid-like behaviour. This makes sand swimming challenging and intriguing, raising…
Although typically possessing four limbs and short bodies, lizards have evolved a diversity of body plans, from short-bodied and fully-limbed to elongate and nearly limbless. Such diversity in body morphology is hypothesized as adaptations…
The physical and bio-mechanical principles that govern undulatory movement on wet surfaces have important applications in physiology, physics, and engineering. The nematode {\it C. elegans}, with its highly stereotypical and functionally…
Natural swimmers usually perform undulations to propel themselves and perform a range of maneuvers. These include various biological species ranging from micro-sized organisms to large-sized fishes that undulate at typical kinematic…
Fish locomotion emerges from a diversity of interactions among deformable structures, surrounding fluids and neuromuscular activations, i.e., fluid-structure interactions (FSI) controlled by fish's motor systems. Previous studies suggested…
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…
Understanding principles of neurolocomotion requires the synthesis of neural activity, sensory feedback, and biomechanics. The nematode \textit{C. elegans} is an ideal model organism for studying locomotion in an integrated neuromechanical…
Many biological fluids are composed of suspended polymers immersed in a viscous fluid. A prime example is mucus, where the polymers are also known to form a network. While the presence of this microstructure is linked with an overall…