Related papers: Active Cloaking in Stokes Flows via Reinforcement …
Trapping and manipulation of small particles underlies many scientific and technological applications. Recently, the precise manipulation of multiple small particles was demonstrated using a Stokes trap that relies only on fluid flow…
The concept of cloaking -- hiding objects from external detection -- has seen wide success in linear systems. Yet, translating these advancements to nonlinear mechanical systems remains an open challenge. Here, we present a new approach to…
The acoustofluidic method holds great promise for manipulating microorganisms. When exposed to the steady vortex structures of acoustic streaming flow, these microorganisms exhibit intriguing dynamic behaviors, such as hydrodynamic trapping…
Rendering objects invisible to impinging acoustic waves (cloaking) and creating acoustic illusions (holography) has been attempted using active and passive approaches. While passive methods are applicable only to narrow frequency bands,…
Cloth folding is a widespread domestic task that is seemingly performed by humans but which is highly challenging for autonomous robots to execute due to the highly deformable nature of textiles; It is hard to engineer and learn…
Flocking behavior of multiple agents can be widely observed in nature such as schooling fish and flocking birds. Recent literature has proposed the possibility that flocking is possible even only a small fraction of agents are informed of…
Invisibility cloaking in acoustic scattering via the approach of transformation optics is considered. The near-cloaks of both passive medium and active/radiating object are investigated. From a practical viewpoint, we are especially…
Robust reinforcement learning agents using high-dimensional observations must be able to identify relevant state features amidst many exogeneous distractors. A representation that captures controllability identifies these state elements by…
It is challenging to use reinforcement learning (RL) in cyber-physical systems due to the lack of safety guarantees during learning. Although there have been various proposals to reduce undesired behaviors during learning, most of these…
The main motivation of this work is the quantitative prediction and description of particle manipulation (displacement across streamlines) in microfluidic flow. Much attention has been paid recently to placing particles in fast oscillatory…
We review recent work on active colloids or swimmers, such as self-propelled microorganisms, phoretic colloidal particles, and artificial micro-robotic systems, moving in fluid-like environments. These environments can be water-like and…
Understanding the stochastic dynamics of tracer particles in active fluids is important for identifying the physical properties of flow generating objects such as colloids, bacteria or algae. Here, we study both analytically and numerically…
Task and motion planning are long-standing challenges in robotics, especially when robots have to deal with dynamic environments exhibiting long-term dynamics, such as households or warehouses. In these environments, long-term dynamics…
Navigating in a fluid flow while being carried by it, using only information accessible from on-board sensors, is a problem commonly faced by small planktonic organisms. It is also directly relevant to autonomous robots deployed in the…
Swimming, i.e., being able to advance in the absence of external forces by performing cyclic shape changes, is particularly demanding at low Reynolds numbers which is the regime of interest for micro-organisms and micro-robots. We focus on…
It is generally believed that transformation optics based cloaking, besides rendering the cloaked region invisible to detection by scattering of incident waves, also shields the region from those same waves. We demonstrate a coupling…
Navigation is a complex skill with a long history of research in animals and humans. In this work, we simulate the Morris Water Maze in 2D to train deep reinforcement learning agents. We perform automatic classification of navigation…
We need to look at our shoelaces as we first learn to tie them but having mastered this skill, can do it from touch alone. We call this phenomenon "sensory scaffolding": observation streams that are not needed by a master might yet aid a…
Coordinated movement and self-organisation of active self-driven agents is common in nature and is seen across different scales, from herds of animals to collective motion in bacteria. Often, these systems are heterogeneous in composition,…
A new method of cloaking is presented. For two-dimensional quasistatics it is proven how a single active exterior cloaking device can be used to shield an object from surrounding fields, yet produce very small scattered fields. The problem…