Related papers: Sea star inspired crawling and bouncing
Global carbon-cycle on our planet ties together the living and the non-living world, coupling ecosystem function to our climate. Gravity driven downward flux of carbon in our oceans in the form of marine snow, commonly referred to as…
Many different robots have been designed and built to work under water. In many cases, researchers have chosen to use bio-inspired platforms. In most cases, the main goal of the fish inspired robots has been set to autonomously swim and…
All vertebrates are capable of performing various types of physical activity. Locomotor patterns are created by the cyclical coordinated work of the skeletal muscles. The organization of such a system in living organisms is responsible for…
Confining a liquid crystal imposes topological constraints on the orientational order, allowing global control of equilibrium systems by manipulation of anchoring boundary conditions. In this article, we investigate whether a similar…
Although commonly associated with limbless animals like snakes and fish, multi-legged organisms like centipedes also utilize undulatory locomotion. Whether these undulations are actively reinforced or resisted by the axial musculature…
Ordered, collective motions commonly arise spontaneously in systems of many interacting, active units, ranging from cellular tissues and bacterial colonies to self-propelled colloids and animal flocks. Active phases are especially rich when…
To address the issues that arise due to the manual navigation of guidewires in endovascular interventions, research in medical robotics has taken a strong interest in developing robotically steerable guidewires, which offer the possibility…
Soft robots are capable of inherently safer interactions with their environment than rigid robots since they can mechanically deform in response to unanticipated stimuli. However, their complex mechanics can make planning and control…
This article presents a new control approach and a dynamic model for engineered flapping flight with many interacting degrees of freedom. This paper explores the applications of neurobiologically inspired control systems in the form of…
An eutactic star, in a n-dimensional space, is a set of N vectors which can be viewed as the projection of N orthogonal vectors in a N-dimensional space. By adequately associating a star of vectors to a particular sea urchin we propose that…
Directing individual motions of many constituents to coherent dynamical state is a fundamental challenge in multiple fields. Here, based on the spherical crystal model, we show that topological defects in particle arrays can be a crucial…
Microtubule (MT) radial arrays or asters establish the internal topology of a cell by interacting with organelles and molecular motors. We proceed to understand the general pattern forming potential of aster-motor systems using a…
Humans can produce complex whole-body motions when interacting with their surroundings, by planning, executing and combining individual limb movements. We investigated this fundamental aspect of motor control in the setting of autonomous…
With the rapid development of Aerial Physical Interaction, the possibility to have aerial robots physically interacting with humans is attracting a growing interest. In one of our previous works, we considered one of the first systems in…
Bump attractors are wandering localised patterns observed in in vivo experiments of spatially-extended neurobiological networks. They are important for the brain's navigational system and specific memory tasks. A bump attractor is…
Microorganisms often encounter anisotropy, for example in mucus and biofilms. We study how anisotropy and elasticity of the ambient fluid affects the speed of a swimming microorganism with a prescribed stroke. Motivated by recent…
Autonomous underwater gliders use buoyancy control to achieve forward propulsion via a sawtooth-like, rise-and-fall trajectory. Because gliders are slow-moving relative to ocean currents, glider control must consider the effect of oceanic…
Active fluids operate by constantly dissipating energy at the particle level to perform a directed motion, yielding dynamics and phases without any equilibrium equivalent. The emerging behaviors have been studied extensively, yet…
Sperm cells perform extremely demanding tasks with minimal capabilities. The cells must quickly navigate in a noisy environment to find an egg within a short time window for successful fertilization without any global positioning…
The properties of biological microswimmers are to a large extent determined by fluid-mediated interactions, which govern their propulsion, perception of their surrounding, and the steering of their motion for feeding or in pursuit.…