Related papers: Crawling on directional surfaces
Animals locomote for various reasons: to search for food, find suitable habitat, pursue prey, escape from predators, or seek a mate. The grand scale of biodiversity contributes to the great locomotory design and mode diversity. Various…
Friction is the essential mediator of terrestrial locomotion, yet in robotic systems it is almost always treated as a passive property fixed by surface materials and conditions. Here, we introduce ultrasonic lubrication as a method to…
Inchworm crawling allows for both quasistatic and dynamic gaits at a wide range of actuation frequencies. This locomotion mechanism is common in nonskeletal animals and exploited extensively in the bio-inspired field of soft robotics. In…
Cell motility in higher organisms (eukaryotes) is crucial to biological functions ranging from wound healing to immune response, and also implicated in diseases such as cancer. For cells crawling on hard surfaces, significant insights into…
The locomotion of flexible membrane-like organisms on top of curved surfaces appears in different contexts and scales. Still, such dynamics have not yet been quantitatively modeled and no realization of such motion in manmade systems has…
Tribological phenomena are governed by combined effects of material properties, topology and surface-chemistry. We study the interplay of multiscale surface structures with molecular-scale interactions towards interpreting static frictional…
Snake robots are inspired by the ability of biological snakes to move over rock, grass, leaves, soil, up trees, along pavement and more. Their ability to move in multiple distinct environments is due to their legless locomotion strategy,…
Recent research on mobile robots has focused on increasing their adaptability to unpredictable and unstructured environments using soft materials and structures. However, the determination of key design parameters and control over these…
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…
We propose an elementary proof based on a penalization technique to show the existence and uniqueness of the solution to a system of variational inequalities modelling the friction-based motion of a two-body crawling system. Here for each…
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…
We report on the dynamics of a model frictional system submitted to minute external perturbations. The system consists of a chain of sliders connected through elastic springs that rest on an incline. By introducing cyclic expansions and…
The mechanosensitivity of cells, which determines how they are able to respond to mechanical signals received from their environment, is crucial for the functioning of all biological systems. In experiments, cells placed on cyclically…
Fluid-based locomotion at low Reynolds number is subject to the constraints of the scallop theorem, which dictate that body kinematics identical under a time-reversal symmetry (in particular, those with a single degree of freedom) cannot…
We extend a model for the morphology and dynamics of a crawling eukaryotic cell to describe cells on micropatterned substrates. This model couples cell morphology, adhesion, and cytoskeletal flow in response to active stresses induced by…
Constructing physical models of living cells and tissues is an extremely challenging task because of the high complexities of both intra- and intercellular processes. In addition, the force that a single cell generates vanishes in total due…
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…
Over the past few decades, oscillating flexible foils have been used to study the physics of organismal propulsion in different fluid environments. Here we extend this work to a study of flexible foils in a frictional environment. When the…
The friction and adhesion between elastic bodies are strongly influenced by the roughness of the surfaces in contact. Here we develop a multiscale molecular dynamics approach to contact mechanics, which can be used also when the surfaces…
Soft and biological matter come in a variety of shapes and geometries. When soft surfaces that do not fit into each other due to a mismatch in Gaussian curvatures form an interface, beautiful geometry-induced patterns emerge. In this paper,…