Related papers: Tuning upstream swimming of micro-robots by shape …
Bacterial contamination of biological conducts, catheters or water resources is a major threat to public health and can be amplified by the ability of bacteria to swim upstream. The mechanisms of this rheotaxis, the reorientation with…
In narrow, unstructured underwater environments such as environmental monitoring and minimally invasive medical procedures, micro soft robots exhibit unique advantages due to their flexible movement capabilities and small size. At the same…
We present a flow-based control strategy that enables resource-constrained marine robots to patrol gyre-like flow environments on an orbital trajectory with a periodicity in a given range. The controller does not require a detailed model of…
Systems of motile microorganisms exhibit a multitude of collective phenomena, including motility-induced phase separation and turbulence. Sensing of the environment and adaptation of movement plays an essential role in the emergent…
The optimal strategy for a microscopic swimmer to migrate across a linear shear flow is discussed. The two cases, in which the swimmer is located at large distance, and in the proximity of a solid wall, are taken into account. It is shown…
Mobile manipulation in dynamic environments is challenging due to movable obstacles blocking the robot's path. Traditional methods, which treat navigation and manipulation as separate tasks, often fail in such 'manipulate-to-navigate'…
Morphing quadrotors with four external actuators can adapt to different restricted scenarios by changing their geometric structure. However, previous works mainly focus on the improvements in structures and controllers, and existing…
Active fluids can develop spontaneous flow instabilities and complex patterns. However, spatio-temporal control of active particles has remained challenging, despite its relevance in biological and applied contexts. Here, we harnessed…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly populating urban areas for delivery and surveillance purposes. In this work, we develop an optimal navigation strategy based on Deep Reinforcement Learning. The environment is represented by…
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…
Recent results suggest that very large datasets of teleoperated robot demonstrations can be used to train transformer-based models that have the potential to generalize to new scenes, robots, and tasks. However, curating, distributing, and…
Centralized trajectory optimization in the joint space of multiple robots allows access to a larger feasible space that can result in smoother trajectories, especially while planning in tight spaces. Unfortunately, it is often…
Natural swimmers usually perform undulations to propel themselves and perform a range of maneuvers. These include various biological species ranging from micro-sized organisms to large-sized fishes that undulate at typical kinematic…
Biological flyers and swimmers navigate in unsteady wake flows using limited sensory abilities and actuation energies. Understanding how vortical structures can be leveraged for energy-efficient navigation in unsteady flows is beneficial in…
Robotic devices provide a great opportunity to assist in delivering physical therapy and rehabilitation movements, yet current robot-assisted methods struggle to incorporate biomechanical metrics essential for safe and effective therapy. We…
The sewer inspection robot MAKRO is an autonomous multi-segment robot with worm-like shape driven by wheels. It is currently under development in the project MAKRO-PLUS. The robot has to navigate autonomously within sewer systems. Its first…
Understanding efficient fish locomotion offers insights for biomechanics, fluid dynamics, and engineering. Traditional studies often miss the link between neuromuscular control and whole-body movement. To explore energy transfer in…
It is known that obstacles can hydrodynamically trap bacteria and synthetic microswimmers in orbits, where the trapping time heavily depends on the swimmer flow field and noise is needed to escape the trap. Here, we use experiments and…
We develop an adversarial-reinforcement learning scheme for microswimmers in statistically homogeneous and isotropic turbulent fluid flows, in both two (2D) and three dimensions (3D). We show that this scheme allows microswimmers to find…
An active swimmer can tow a passive cargo by binding it to form a self-propelling dimer. The orientation of the cargo relative to the axis of the active dimer's head is determined by the hydrodynamic interactions associated with the…