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Humanoid robots are made to resemble humans but their locomotion abilities are far from ours in terms of agility and versatility. When humans walk on complex terrains, or face external disturbances, they combine a set of strategies,…
Physics governing the locomotion of microorganisms and other microsystems is dominated by viscous damping. An effective swimming strategy involves the non-reciprocal and periodic deformations of the considered body. Here, we show that a…
Swimming in circles occurs in a variety of situations at low Reynolds number. Here we propose a simple model for a swimmer that undergoes circular motion, generalising the model of a linear swimmer proposed by Najafi and Golestanian (Phys.…
Bacteria can exploit mechanics to display remarkable plasticity in response to locally changing physical and chemical conditions. Compliant structures play a striking role in their taxis behavior, specifically for navigation inside complex…
We study two microswimmers consisting of a spherical rigid head and a passive elastic tail. In the first one the tail is clamped to the head, and the system oscillates under the action of an external torque. In the second one, head and tail…
Locomotion may be induced on three levels. On a classical level, actuators and limbs follow the sequence of open-loop top-down control signals they receive. Limbs may move alternatively on their own, which implies that interlimb…
Increasingly stringent throughput requirements in the industry necessitate the need for lightweight design of high-precision motion systems to allow for high accelerations, while still achieving accurate positioning of the moving-body. The…
Predicting how a deformable body moves and deforms in a viscous flow underlies problems ranging from microorganism locomotion to soft microrobotics, yet existing frameworks are either problem-specific or ill-suited to inverse design. We…
A key problem in robotic locomotion is in finding optimal shape changes to effectively displace systems through the world. Variational techniques for gait optimization require estimates of body displacement per gait cycle; however, 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 present two numerical schemes for passive tracer particles in the hydrodynamical moving-mesh code AREPO, and compare their performance for various problems, from simple setups to cosmological simulations. The purpose of tracer particles…
Rectilinear crawling locomotion is a primitive and common mode of locomotion in slender, soft-bodied animals. It requires coordinated contractions that propagate along a body that interacts frictionally with its environment. We propose a…
We present a scheme of self-propelling liquid droplets which closely mimics the locomotion of some protozoal organisms, so-called squirmers. In contrast to other schemes proposed earlier, locomotion paths are not self-avoiding, since the…
We study the trajectories of a model microorganism inside three-dimensional channels with square and rectangular cross-sections. Using (i) numerical simulations based on lattice-Boltzmann method, and (ii) analytical expressions using…
Microswimmers display an intriguing ability to navigate through fluids with spatially varying viscosity, a behavior known as viscotaxis, which plays a crucial role in guiding their motion. In this study, we reveal that the orientation…
In Stokes flow, Purcell's scallop theorem forbids objects with time-reversible (reciprocal) swimming strokes from moving. In the presence of inertia, this restriction is eased and reciprocally deforming bodies can swim. A number of recent…
Swimming at low Reynolds number in Newtonian fluids is only possible through non-reciprocal body deformations due to the kinematic reversibility of the Stokes equations. We consider here a model swimmer consisting of two linked spheres,…
Active dumbbell suspensions constitute one of the simplest model system for collective swimming at low Reynolds number. Generalizing recent work, we derive and analyze stroke-averaged equations of motion that capture the effective…
Our understanding of the neural basis of locomotor behavior can be informed by careful quantification of animal movement. Classical descriptions of legged locomotion have defined discrete locomotor gaits, characterized by distinct patterns…
We seek the best stroke sequences of a finite-size swimming predator chasing a non-motile point or finite--size prey at low Reynolds number. We use optimal control to seek the globally-optimal solutions for the former and RL for general…