Related papers: Magnetic Propulsion of Self-Assembled Colloidal Ca…
Collective control of mobile microrobotic swarms is indispensable for their potential high-impact applications in targeted drug delivery, medical diagnostics, parallel micromanipulation, and environmental sensing and remediation. Lack of…
Colloidal particles hold promise for mobilizing and removing trapped immiscible fluids from porous media, with implications for key energy and water applications. Most studies focus on accomplishing this goal using particles that can…
Cooperative transport, the simultaneous movement of an object by multiple agents, has been widely observed in biological systems such as ant colonies, which improve efficiency and adaptability in dynamic environments. Inspired by these…
Autonomous mobile manipulation robots that can collect trolleys are widely used to liberate human resources and fight epidemics. Most prior robotic trolley collection solutions only detect trolleys with 2D poses or are merely based on…
Active colloids and externally actuated semi-flexible filaments provide basic building blocks for designing autonomously motile micro-machines. Here, we show that a passive semi-flexible filament can be actuated and transported by attaching…
Self-assembly of colloidal particles is poised to become a powerful composite material fabrication technique, but remains challenged by a limited control over the ensuing structures. We develop a new breed of nematic colloids that are…
As society paves its way towards device miniaturization and precision medicine, micro-scale actuation and guided transport become increasingly prominent research fields with high impact in both technological and clinical contexts. In order…
The pursuit of green methodologies for fabricating optoelectronic devices necessitates the adoption of self-assembly-based strategies to engineer efficient and sustainable platforms. Microbubble lithography (MBL) stands out as a directed…
The use of colloidal supported lipid bilayers (CSLBs) has recently been extended to create colloidal joints, that - in analogy to their macroscopic counterparts - can flexibly connect colloidal particles. These novel elements enable the…
Encapsulation of chemicals using polymer membranes enables to control their transport and delivery for applications such as agrochemistry or detergency. To rationalize the design of polymer capsules, it is necessary to understand how the…
The quest for designing new self-propelled colloids is fuelled by the demand for simple experimental models to study the collective behaviour of their more complex natural counterparts. Most synthetic self-propelled particles move by…
The control of particle trajectories in structured microfluidic environments has significantly advanced sorting technologies, most notably through deterministic lateral displacement (DLD). While previous work has largely targeted rigid,…
Many living and artificial systems show a similar emergent behavior and collective motions on different scales, starting from swarms of bacteria to synthetic active particles, herds of mammals and crowds of people. What all these systems…
The soft character of organic materials leads to strong coupling between molecular nuclear and electronic dynamics. This coupling opens the way to control charge transport in organic electronic devices by inducing molecular vibrational…
Self-assembly is one of the crucial mechanisms allowing to design multifunctional materials. Soft hybrid materials contain components of different nature and exhibit competitive interactions which drive self-organisation into structures of…
When a solid body floats at the interface of a vibrating liquid bath, the relative motion between the object and interface generates outwardly propagating surface waves. It has recently been demonstrated that millimetric objects with…
By leveraging their high mobility and small size, insects have been combined with microcontrollers to build up cyborg insects for various practical applications. Unfortunately, all current cyborg insects rely on implanted electrodes to…
We study how dispersions of colloidal particles in a cholesteric liquid crystal behave under a time-dependent electric field. By controlling the amplitude and shape of the applied field wave, we show that the system can be reproducibly…
Small-scale robots offer significant potential in minimally-invasive medical procedures. Due to the nature of soft biological tissues, however, robots are exposed to complex environments with various challenges in locomotion, which is…
Molecular motors power directed transport of cargoes within cells. Even if a single motor is sufficient to transport a cargo, motors often cooperate in small teams. We discuss the cooperative cargo transport by several motors theoretically…