Related papers: Microtransformers: controlled microscale navigatio…
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…
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…
Locomotion and transport of microorganisms in fluids is an essential aspect of life. Search for food, orientation toward light, spreading of off-spring, and the formation of colonies are only possible due to locomotion. Swimming at the…
The behavior of living systems is based on the experience they gained through their interactions with the environment [1]. This experience is stored in the complex biochemical networks of cells and organisms to provide a relationship…
Hot microswimmers are self-propelled Brownian particles that exploit local heating for their directed self-thermophoretic motion. We provide a pedagogical overview of the key physical mechanisms underlying this promising new technology. It…
Contrary to microbial taxis, where a tactic response to external stimuli is controlled by complex chemical pathways acting like sensor-actuator loops, taxis of artificial microswimmers is a purely stochastic effect associated with a…
Magnetic microrobots that swim through liquid media are of interest for minimally invasive medical procedures, bioengineering, and manufacturing. Many of the envisaged applications, such as micromanipulation and targeted cargo delivery,…
Systems of motile microorganisms exhibit a multitude of collective phenomena, including motility-induced phase separation and turbulence. Sensing of the environment and adaptation of movement plays an essential role in the emergent…
We design new navigation strategies for travel time optimization of microscopic self-propelled particles in complex and noisy environments. In contrast to strategies relying on the results of optimal control theory, these protocols allow…
True microrobots, in contrast with externally controlled microparticles, must harvest or carry their own source of energy, as well as their own (preferably programmable) microcontroller of actuators for locomotion, using information…
The self-propulsion of artificial and biological microswimmers (i.e., active colloidal particles) has often been modelled by using a force and a torque entering into the overdamped equations for the Brownian motion of passive particles.…
This work aims at finding optimal navigation policies for thin, deformable microswimmers that progress in a viscous fluid by propagating a sinusoidal undulation along their slender body. These active filaments are embedded in a prescribed,…
The emerging field of self-driven active particles in fluid environments has recently created significant interest in the biophysics and bioengineering communities owing to their promising future biomedical and technological applications.…
In the study of microscopic flows, self-propulsion has been particularly topical in recent years, with the rise of miniature artificial swimmers as a new tool for flow control, low Reynolds number mixing, micromanipulation or even drug…
The survival of many microorganisms, like \textit{Leptospira} or \textit{Spiroplasma} bacteria, can depend on their ability to navigate towards regions of favorable viscosity. While this ability, called viscotaxis, has been observed in…
Swimming cells and microorganisms must often move though complex fluids that contain an immersed microstructure such as polymer molecules, or filaments. In many important biological processes, such as mammalian reproduction and bacterial…
Microswimmers can acquire information on the surrounding fluid by sensing mechanical queues. They can then navigate in response to these signals. We analyse this navigation by combining deep reinforcement learning with direct numerical…
Flagellated microorganisms can swim at low Reynolds numbers and adapt to changes in their environment. Specifically, the flagella can switch their shapes or modes through gene expression. In the past decade, efforts have been made to…
Microorganisms ofter move in confined, disordered environments, where hydrodynamic couplings can modify their transport behavior. Using extensive finite-element simulations, we investigate the dynamics of microswimmers -- modeled as…
In this article, we consider a swimmer (i.e. a self-deformable body) immersed in a fluid, the flow of which is governed by the stationary Stokes equations. This model is relevant for studying the locomotion of microorganisms or micro robots…