Related papers: Artificial Tribotactic Microscopic Walkers
A variety of transport processes in natural and man-made systems are intrinsically random. To model their stochasticity, lattice random walks have been employed for a long time, mainly by considering Cartesian lattices. However, in many…
Nanomechanical devices can operate at much higher speeds than their macroscopic analogues, due to low inertia. For example, peak speeds >100m/s have been predicted for carbon nanotube devices. This stimulates our interest in the…
With the help of a simple two-dimensional model we simulate the tribological properties of a thin lubricant film consisting of linear (chain) molecules in the ordinary soft-lubricant regime. We find that friction generally increases with…
Identifying the physical properties of the surrounding environment is essential for robotic locomotion and navigation to deal with non-geometric hazards, such as slippery and deformable terrains. It would be of great benefit for robots to…
Atomistic simulations are powerful tools for investigating tribological phenomena at a fundamental level; however, simulating a tribological system remains challenging due to the multiscale nature of frictional processes. Recently, we…
The mechanisms underlying chemifriction, i.e. the contribution of interfacial bonding to friction in defected twisted graphene interfaces are revealed using fully atomistic machine-learning molecular dynamics simulations. This involves…
The physics of dynamic friction on water molecule contaminated surfaces is still poorly understood. In line with the growing interest in hydrophobic contact for industrial applications, this paper focuses on friction mechanisms in such…
Most passive droplet transport strategies rely on spatial variations of material properties to drive droplet motion, leading to gradient-based mechanisms with intrinsic length scales that limit the droplet velocity or the transport…
In many sliding systems consisting of solid object on a solid substrate under dry condition, the friction force does not depend on the apparent contact area and is proportional to the loading force. This behaviour is called Amontons' law…
We study diffusion on a multilayer network where the contact dynamics between the nodes is governed by a random process and where the waiting time distribution differs for edges from different layers. We study the impact on a random walk of…
Microorganisms often perform chemotaxis, (i.e., sensing and moving toward a region with a higher concentration of an attractive chemical) by changing the rate of tumbling for random walk. We studied several models with internal adaptive…
Friction is the basic, ubiquitous mechanical interaction between two surfaces that results in resistance to motion and energy dissipation. In spite of its technological and economic significance, our ability to control friction remains…
One of the most fundamental questions in tribology concerns the area dependence of friction at the nanoscale. Here, experiments are presented where the frictional resistance of nanoparticles is measured by pushing them with the tip of an…
Active matter systems comprise self-propelled particles that move on a substrate while leaving chemical trails that influence other particles through chemotaxis (e.g., slime-depositing bacteria). Orientational chemotaxis manifests as a…
Friction is central to the motion of active (self-propelled) objects such as bacteria, animals, and robots. While in a viscous fluid friction is described by Stokes's law, objects in contact with other solid bodies are often governed by…
Axis-driven random walks were introduced by P. Andreoletti and P. Debs [AD23] to provide a rough description of the behaviour of a particle trapped in a localized force field. In contrast to their work, we examine the scenario where a…
The static friction between crystalline surfaces separated by a molecularly thin layer of adsorbed molecules is calculated using molecular dynamics simulations. These molecules naturally lead to a finite static friction that is consistent…
Motivated by observations of the dynamics of {\it Myxococcus xanthus}, we present a self-interacting random walk model that describes the competition between chemokinesis and chemotaxis. Cells are constrained to move in one dimension, but…
Many applications require robots to move through complex 3-D terrain with large obstacles, such as self-driving, search and rescue, and extraterrestrial exploration. Although robots are already excellent at avoiding sparse obstacles, they…
Most existing locomotion devices that represent the sensation of walking target a user who is actually performing a walking motion. Here, we attempted to represent the walking sensation, especially a kinesthetic sensation and advancing…