Related papers: Efficient collective swimming by harnessing vortic…
Living in groups brings benefits to many animals, such as a protection against predators and an improved capacity for sensing and making decisions while searching for resources in uncertain environments. A body of studies has shown how…
Microswimmers in turbulent flows often navigate complex, heterogeneous, and obstacle-rich environments, where they exhibit intricate behaviors such as trapping at and escape from obstacles. We generalize recent $\mathcal{Q}-$learning…
Energy consumption for hot water production is a major draw in high efficiency buildings. Optimizing this has typically been approached from a thermodynamics perspective, decoupled from occupant influence. Furthermore, optimization usually…
Bio-inspired underwater vehicles could yield improved efficiency, maneuverability, and environmental compatibility over conventional propeller-driven underwater vehicles. However, to realize the swimming performance of biology, there is a…
Autonomous robot swarms must be able to make fast and accurate collective decisions, but speed and accuracy are known to be conflicting goals. While collective decision-making is widely studied in swarm robotics research, only few works on…
Dynamic soaring enables sustained flight by extracting energy from wind shear, yet it is commonly understood as a cycle-level maneuver that assumes stable flow conditions. In realistic unsteady environments, however, such assumptions are…
We investigate the stability of self-propelled particle flocks in the Taylor-Green vortex, a steady vortical flow. We consider a model where particles align themselves to a combination of the orientation and the acceleration of particles…
Fish schools present high-efficiency group behaviors through simple individual interactions to collective migration and dynamic escape from the predator. The school behavior of fish is usually a good inspiration to design control…
Scombrid fishes and tuna are efficient swimmers capable of maximizing performance to escape predators and save energy during long journeys. A key aspect in achieving these goals is the flexibility of the tail, which the fish optimizes…
Cooperation is vital for the survival of a swarm$^1$. Large scale cooperation allows murmuring starlings to outmaneuver preying falcons$^2$, shoaling sardines to outsmart sea lions$^3$, and homo sapiens to outlive their Pleistocene…
Energy saving mechanisms are ubiquitous in nature. Aerodynamic and hydrodynamic drafting, vortice uplift, Bernoulli suction, thermoregulatory coupling, path following, physical hooks, synchronization, and cooperation are only some of the…
This paper presents a model-free deep reinforcement learning framework for informative path planning with heterogeneous fleets of autonomous surface vehicles to locate and collect plastic waste. The system employs two teams of vehicles:…
Small-scale vortical motions in the upper solar atmosphere are abundant and occupy about 2.8% of the photosphere at any given time. Although considerable work has focused on the detection and analysis of individual solar vortices, the…
Many microorganisms swim by performing larger non-reciprocal shape deformations that are initiated locally by molecular motors. However, it remains unclear how decentralized shape control determines the movement of the entire organism.…
Airborne Wind Energy is a lightweight technology that allows power extraction from the wind using airborne devices such as kites and gliders, where the airfoil orientation can be dynamically controlled in order to maximize performance. The…
Controlled gliding is one of the most energetically efficient modes of transportation for natural and human powered fliers. Here we demonstrate that gliding and landing strategies with different optimality criteria can be identified through…
Weakly electric fish, like Gnathonemus petersii, use a remarkable electrical modality for active sensing and communication, but studying their rich electrosensing and electrocommunication behavior and associated neural activity in…
While a rich variety of self-propelled particle models propose to explain the collective motion of fish and other animals, rigorous statistical comparison between models and data remains a challenge. Plausible models should be flexible…
We use the Deep Q-Network with reinforcement learning to investigate the emergence of odd elasticity in an elastic microswimmer model. For an elastic microswimmer, it is challenging to obtain the optimized dynamics due to the intricate…
We propose a novel active-flow-control (AFC) strategy for bluff bodies to hide their hydrodynamic traces from predators. A group of windward-suction-leeward-blowing (WSLB) actuators are adopted to control the wake of a circular cylinder…