Related papers: Locomoting robots composed of immobile robots
While robots are increasingly integrated into the built environment, little is known how their qualities can meaningfully influence our spaces to facilitate enjoyable and agreeable interaction, rather than robotic settings that are driven…
Motivated by various recent experimental findings, we propose a dynamical model of intermittently self-propelled particles: active particles that recurrently switch between two modes of motion, namely an active run-state and a turn state,…
The collective motion of arrays of cilia - tiny, hairlike protrusions - drives the locomotion of numerous microorganisms, enabling multimodal motion and autonomous switching between gaits to navigate complex environments. To endow…
Active systems contain self-propelled particles and can spontaneously self-organize into patterns making them attractive candidates for the self-assembly of smart soft materials. One key limitation of our present understanding of these…
New materials aim at exploiting the great control of living organisms over molecular architectures and minerals. Optical biomimetics has been widely developed by microengineering, leading to photonic components with order resembling those…
Active particles contain internal degrees of freedom with the ability to take in and dissipate energy and, in the process, execute systematic movement. Examples include all living organisms and their motile constituents such as molecular…
Traditional robots have rigid links and structures that limit their ability to interact with the dynamics of their immediate environment. For example, conventional robot manipulators with rigid links can only manipulate objects using…
A controllable soft solid is realised in vortex matter in a type II superconductor. The two-dimensional unit cell area can be varied by a factor of $10^4$ in the solid phase, without a change of crystal symmetry offering easy exploration of…
The complexity of condensed matter arises from emergent behaviors that cannot be understood by analyzing individual constituents in isolation. While traditional condensed-matter approaches-developed primarily for ideal crystalline…
Granular media (GM) present locomotor challenges for terrestrial and extraterrestrial devices because they can flow and solidify in response to localized intrusion of wheels, limbs, and bodies. While the development of airplanes and…
Traditional robotic mechanisms contain a series of rigid links connected by rotational joints that provide powered motion, all of which is controlled by a central processor. By contrast, analogous mechanisms found in nature, such as octopus…
Spatio-temporal patterns emerging from an initial quiescent, uniform state is a phenomenon observed in many dynamical systems sustained far from thermodynamic equilibrium, the practical application of which has only recently begun to be…
This paper introduces novel air actuated spherical robot called "RollRoller". The RollRoller robot consists of two essential parts: tubes covered with a shell as a frame and mechanical controlling parts to correspond movements. The…
Spontaneous low-frequency oscillations on the order of several hertz are the drivers of many crucial processes in nature. From bacterial swimming to mammal gaits, the conversion of static energy inputs into slowly oscillating electrical and…
Mobile microrobots are envisioned to be useful in a wide range of high-impact applications, many of which requiring cohesive group formation to maintain self-bounded swarms in the absence of confining boundaries. Cohesive group formation…
Interactions between active individuals in animal collectives lead to emergent responses that remain elusive in synthetic soft matter. Here, shape-morphing polymers are used to create bio-inspired transient solids that self-assemble with…
Controlled activity of active entities interacting with a passive environment can generate emergent system-level phenomena, positioning such systems as promising platforms for potential downstream applications in targeted drug delivery,…
In this paper, we address the problem of manipulating multi-particle aggregates using a bimanual robotic system. Our approach enables the autonomous transport of dispersed particles through a series of shaping and pushing actions using…
Morphological computing, the use of the physical design of a robot to ease the realization of a given task has been proven to be a relevant concept in the context of swarm robotics. Here we demonstrate both experimentally and numerically,…
Active matter comprised of self-propelled interacting units holds a major promise for extraction of useful work from its seemingly chaotic out-of-equilibrium dynamics. Streamlining active matter to produce work is especially important at…