Related papers: The dynamics of scattering in undulatory active co…
Cooperative transport is a striking phenomenon where multiple agents join forces to transit a payload too heavy for the individual. While social animals such as ants are routinely observed to coordinate transport at scale, reproducing the…
Collective motion in actively propelled particle systems is triggered on the very local scale by nucleation of coherently moving units consisting of just a handful of particles. These units grow and merge over time, ending up in a…
In many systems motion occurs on deformed and deformable surfaces, setting up the possibility for dynamical interactions solely mediated by the coupling of the entities with their environment. Here we study the "two-body" dynamics of robot…
Active droplets emit a chemical solute at their surface that modifies their local interfacial tension. They exploit the nonlinear coupling of the convective transport of solute to the resulting Marangoni flows to self-propel. Such swimming…
Many biological systems synchronize their movement through physical interactions. By far the most well studied examples concern physical interactions through a fluid: beating cilia, swimming sperm and worms, and flapping wings, all display…
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…
Active droplets undergoing micellar solubilization can self-propel themselves by emitting filled micelles from their surface and are by nature anti-chemotactic. These droplets get repelled by their own trail of filled micelles or by other…
In this paper, we propose a distributed algorithm to uniformly scatter the robots along a grid, with robots on alternate nodes of this grid distribution. These homogeneous, autonomous mobile robots place themselves equidistant apart on the…
Experiments have shown that self-propelled particles can slide along the surface of a circular obstacle without becoming trapped over long times. Using simulations and theory, we study the impact of boundary conditions on the diffusive…
Inert particles suspended in active fluids of self-propelled particles are known to often exhibit enhanced diffusion and novel coherent structures. Here we numerically investigate the dynamical behavior and self-organization in a system…
In this context, a major focus of this thesis is on unintentional collisions, where a straight goal is to eliminate injury from users and passerby's via realtime sensing and control systems. A less obvious focus is to combine collision…
Robotic materials are multi-robot systems formulated to leverage the low-order computation and actuation of the constituents to manipulate the high-order behavior of the entire material. We study the behaviors of ensembles composed of smart…
An asymmetric two-link robot supported atop a flat platform by wheels that roll and pivot freely, but do not slip laterally, will develop forward momentum if the joint between the links is actuated internally. In particular, oscillations in…
We study, both theoretically and experimentally, the scattering properties of optical dipole-mode vector solitons - radially asymmetric composite self-trapped optical beams. First, we analyze the soliton collisions in an isotropic…
Robots often interact with the world via attached parts such as wheels, joints, or appendages. In many systems, these interactions, and the manner in which they lead to locomotion, can be understood using the machinery of geometric…
We explore a two-body system with superexponential interactions that serves as a fundamental building block for a route to complexity. While being of striking simplicity this highly nonlinear interaction yields a plethora of intriguing…
Abridged abstract: Inert interactions between randomly moving entities and spatial disorder play a crucial role in quantifying the diffusive properties of a system. These interactions affect only the movement of the entities, and examples…
The coherent control of scattering processes is considered, with electron impact dissociation of H$_2^+$ used as an example. The physical mechanism underlying coherently controlled stationary state scattering is exposed by analyzing a…
In studies of dynamical systems, helium atoms scatter coherently from an ensemble of adsorbates as they diffuse on the surface. The results give information on the co-operative behaviour of interacting adsorbates and thus include the…
Industrial manipulators do not collapse under their own weight when powered off due to the friction in their joints. Although these mechanism are effective for stiff position control of pick-and-place, they are inappropriate for legged…