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We will present a new general framework for robust and adaptive control that allows for distributed and scalable learning and control of large systems of interconnected linear subsystems. The control method is demonstrated for a linear…
Slug flows are a typical intermittent two-phase flow pattern that can occur in submarine pipelines connecting the wells to the production facility and that is known to cause undesired consequences. In this context, computational fluid…
Precise and high-fidelity force control is critical for new generations of robots that interact with humans and unknown environments. Mobile robots, such as wearable devices and legged robots, must also be lightweight to accomplish their…
Soft underwater robots typically explore bioinspired designs at the expense of power efficiency when compared to traditional underwater robots, which limits their practical use in real-world applications. We leverage a fluidic closed-loop…
This paper presents a compact system, OpenPneu, to support the pneumatic actuation for multi-chambers on soft robots. Micro-pumps are employed in the system to generate airflow and therefore no extra input as compressed air is needed. Our…
This paper studies the design of controllers for discontinuous dynamics that ensure the safety of non-smooth sets. The safe set is represented by arbitrarily nested unions and intersections of 0-superlevel sets of differentiable functions.…
We present a theoretical description of the fluid--structure interaction observed within a Starling resistor. The typical setup consists of a pre-stretched finite length thin-walled elastic tube mounted between two rigid tubes. The…
Time-dependent injection strategies are commonly employed to control the number of viscous fingers emerging at the interface separating two fluids during radial displacement in Hele-Shaw flows. Here we demonstrate theoretically that such a…
Robust empirical constitutive laws for granular materials in air or in a viscous fluid have been expressed in terms of timescales based on the dynamics of a single particle. However, some behaviours such as viscosity bifurcation or shear…
In this paper we study how to shape temporal pulses to switch a bistable system between its stable steady states. Our motivation for pulse-based control comes from applications in synthetic biology, where it is generally difficult to…
Soft valves serve to modulate and rectify flows in complex vasculatures across the tree of life, e.g. in the heart of every human reading this. Here we consider a minimal physical model of the heart mitral valve modeled as a flexible…
The impact forces during switching operations of short-stroke actuators may cause bouncing, audible noise and mechanical wear. The application of soft-landing control strategies to these devices aims at minimizing the impact velocities of…
Microfluidic systems are now being designed with precision to execute increasingly complex tasks. However, their operation often requires numerous external control devices due to the typically linear nature of microscale flows, which has…
We present experimental evidence of multiple blood flow configurations in a relatively simple microfluidic network under constant inlet conditions. We provide evidence of multistability and unsteady dynamics and find good agreement with a…
We study elastic snap-through induced by a control parameter that evolves dynamically. In particular, we study an elastic arch subject to an end-shortening that evolves linearly with time, i.e. at a constant rate. For large end-shortening…
A properly designed controller can help improve the quality of experimental measurements or force a dynamical system to follow a completely new time-evolution path. Recent developments in deep reinforcement learning have made steep advances…
We show that a squeezed bath, that acts on the central element of a harmonic chain, can drive the whole system to a steady state featuring a series of nested entangled pairs of oscillators that, ideally, covers the whole chain regardless of…
Inspired by the vertebrate branch of the animal kingdom, articulated soft robots are robotic systems embedding elastic elements into a classic rigid (skeleton-like) structure. Leveraging on their bodies elasticity, soft robots promise to…
Many applications of computational fluid dynamics require multiple simulations of a flow under different input conditions. In this paper, a numerical algorithm is developed to efficiently determine a set of such simulations in which the…
We study certain significant properties of the equilibrium configurations of a rigid body subject to an undamped elastic restoring force, in the stream of a viscous liquid in an unbounded 3D domain. The motion of the coupled system is…