Related papers: Locomoting robots composed of immobile robots
Mobile soft robots offer compelling applications in fields ranging from urban search and rescue to planetary exploration. A critical challenge of soft robotic control is that the nonlinear dynamics imposed by soft materials often result in…
The giant single-celled slime mould Physarum polycephalum exhibits complex morphological adaptation and amoeboid movement as it forages for food and may be seen as a minimal example of complex robotic behaviour. Swarm computation has…
Run-and-tumble (RNT) motion is a prominent locomotion strategy employed by many living microorganisms. It is characterized by straight swimming intervals (runs), which are interrupted by sudden reorientation events (tumbles). In contrast,…
We present a distributed algorithm for a swarm of active particles to camouflage in an environment. Each particle is equipped with sensing, computation and communication, allowing the system to take color and gradient information from the…
Recently, long and slender living worms have garnered significant interest because of their impressive ability to exhibit diverse emergent behaviors in highly entangled physical and topological conditions. These worms can form an active…
We study two mechanisms of locomotion of a body in an inviscid fluid, which take place without the shedding of vorticity; we consider two simple examples of robots which are able to move along a straight trajectory. The first one consists…
We investigate gathering algorithms for asynchronous autonomous mobile robots moving in uniform ring-shaped networks. Different from most work using the Look-Compute-Move (LCM) model, we assume that robots have limited visibility and…
Insects have tiny brains but complicated visual systems for motion perception. A handful of insect visual neurons have been computationally modeled and successfully applied for robotics. How different neurons collaborate on motion…
A remarkable feat of active matter physics is that systems as diverse as collections of self-propelled particles, nematics mixed with molecular motors, and interacting robots can all be described by symmetry-based continuum theories. These…
Micro- and molecular-robotic systems act as large-scale swarms. Capabilities of sensing, communication and information processing are very limited on these scales. This short position paper describes a swarm-based minimalistic approach,…
Designing soft robots poses considerable challenges: automated design approaches may be particularly appealing in this field, as they promise to optimize complex multi-material machines with very little or no human intervention.…
Living organisms are molecular systems with self-sustained dynamics via energy conversion through molecular cooperation, resulting in highly complex macroscopic behaviors. Construction of such autonomous macroscopic dynamics at a molecular…
We explore the locomotion of soft robots in granular medium (GM) resulting from the elastic deformation of slender rods. A low-cost, rapidly fabricable robot inspired by the physiological structure of bacteria is presented. It consists of a…
Physical learning is an emerging paradigm in science and engineering whereby (meta)materials acquire desired macroscopic behaviors by exposure to examples. So far, it has been applied to static properties such as elastic moduli and…
Soft robots are naturally designed to perform safe interactions with their environment, like locomotion and manipulation. In the literature, there are now many concepts, often bio-inspired, to propose new modes of locomotion or grasping.…
Active particles with their characteristic feature of self-propulsion are regarded as the simplest models for motility in living systems. The accumulation of active particles in low activity regions has led to the general belief that…
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…
Particle systems are physical systems of simple computational particles that can bond to neighboring particles and use these bonds to move from one spot to another (non-occupied) spot. These particle systems are supposed to be able to…
By systematically varying the mobility of self-propelled particles in a two-dimensional (2D) lattice, we experimentally study the influence of particle mobility on system's collective motion. Our system is intrinsically non-equilibrium due…
Exploring bodies of water on their surface allows robots to efficiently communicate and harvest energy from the sun. On the water surface, however, robots often face highly unstructured environments, cluttered with plant matter, animals,…