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A remarkable variety of organisms use metachronal coordination (i.e., numerous neighboring appendages beating sequentially with a fixed phase lag) to swim or pump fluid. This coordination strategy is used by microorganisms to break symmetry…
We study the hydrodynamic coupling of neighboring micro-beads placed in a dual optical trap setup allowing us to precisely control the degree of coupling and directly measure time-dependent trajectories of the entrained beads. Average…
The performance of a single or the collection of microswimmers strongly depends on the hydrodynamic coupling among their constituents and themselves. We present a numerical study for a single and a pair of microswimmers based on lattice…
Biological microswimmers often encounter deformable boundaries in physiological conditions; for instance, the viscoelastic walls of reproductive tract during migration of spermatozoa, or host tissue during early bacterial biofilm formation.…
Acoustic manipulation in microfluidic devices enables contactless handling of biological cells for Lab-on-Chip applications. This paper analyzes the controllability of multi-particle systems in a one-dimensional acoustic standing wave…
Soft robotics hold promise in the development of safe yet powered assistive wearable devices for infants. Key to this is the development of closed-loop controllers that can help regulate pneumatic pressure in the device's actuators in an…
Catalytic microswimmers convert the chemical energy of a fuel into motion, sustaining spatial chemical gradients and fluid flows that drive their propulsion. This leads to unconventional individual behavior and the emergence of collective…
To model the morphogenesis of rod-shaped bacterial micro-colony, several individual-based models have been proposed in the biophysical literature. When studying the shape of micro-colonies, most models present interaction forces such as…
A hyper-redundant robotic arm is a manipulator with many degrees of freedom, capable of executing tasks in cluttered environments where robotic arms with fewer degrees of freedom are unable to operate. This paper introduces a new method for…
Accurate and autonomous transportation of micro-objects and biological cells can enable significant advances in a wide variety of research disciplines. Here, we present a novel, vision-based, model-free microrobotic pushing algorithm for…
Micron-size self-propelling particles are often proposed as synthetic models for biological microswimmers, yet they lack internally regulated adaptation, which is central to the autonomy of their biological counterparts. Conversely,…
In this paper, an adaptive control scheme based on using neural networks is designed to guarantee the desired behavior of a micro-robot which is equipped with vibrating actuators and follows the principle of slip-stick movement. There are…
The Modboat is a low-cost, underactuated, modular robot capable of surface swimming, docking to other modules, and undocking from them using only a single motor and two passive flippers. Undocking is achieved by causing intentional…
We address the problem of controlling a dynamical system governing the motion of a 3D weighted shape changing body swimming in a perfect fluid. The rigid displacement of the swimmer results from the exchange of momentum between prescribed…
Geometric confinements are frequently encountered in soft matter systems and in particular significantly alter the dynamics of swimming microorganisms in viscous media. Surface-related effects on the motility of microswimmers can lead to…
Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are few dynamic simulation tools available to accurately predict the motion or performance of untethered microrobots as they…
Transport of material across liquid interfaces is ubiquitous for living cells and is also a crucial step in drug delivery and in many industrial processes. The fluids that are present on either side of the interfaces will usually have…
In nature, many unicellular organisms are able to swim with the help of beating filaments, where local energy input leads to cooperative undulatory beating motion. Here, we investigate by employing reinforcement learning how undulatory…
Navigation of microorganisms is controlled by internal processes ultimately sensitive to mechanical or chemical signaling encountered along the path. In many natural environments, such as porous soils or physiological ducts, motile species…
Myxobacteria are social bacteria, that can glide in 2D and form counter-propagating, interacting waves. Here we present a novel age-structured, continuous macroscopic model for the movement of myxobacteria. The derivation is based on…