Related papers: Tuning upstream swimming of micro-robots by shape …
Synthetic microswimmers show great promise in biomedical applications such as drug delivery and microsurgery. Their locomotion, however, is subject to stringent constraints due to the dominance of viscous over inertial forces at low…
While undulatory swimming of elongate limbless robots has been extensively studied in open hydrodynamic environments, less research has been focused on limbless locomotion in complex, cluttered aquatic environments. Motivated by the concept…
We design new navigation strategies for travel time optimization of microscopic self-propelled particles in complex and noisy environments. In contrast to strategies relying on the results of optimal control theory, these protocols allow…
We seek the best stroke sequences of a finite-size swimming predator chasing a non-motile point or finite--size prey at low Reynolds number. We use optimal control to seek the globally-optimal solutions for the former and RL for general…
Particular types of plankton in aquatic ecosystems can coordinate their motion depending on the local flow environment to reach regions conducive to their growth or reproduction. Investigating their swimming strategies with regard to the…
Micro-robots for, e.g., biomedical applications, need to be equipped with motility strategies that enable them to navigate through complex environments. Inspired by biological microorganisms we recreate motility patterns such as…
Microswimmers in turbulent flows often navigate complex, heterogeneous, and obstacle-rich environments, where they exhibit intricate behaviors such as trapping at and escape from obstacles. We generalize recent $\mathcal{Q}-$learning…
Microscopic robots could perform tasks with high spatial precision, such as acting in biological tissues on the scale of individual cells, provided they can reach precise locations. This paper evaluates the feasibility of in vivo locomotion…
We explore the mechanism underlying the anomalous rheology of puller-type microswimmer suspensions through direct hydrodynamic simulations. Puller-type swimmers generate contractile flow fields along their swimming direction, leading to…
When swimming at low Reynolds numbers, inertial effects are negligible and reciprocal movements cannot induce net motion. Instead, symmetry breaking is necessary to achieve net propulsion. Directed swimming can be supported by magnetic…
We study the dynamics of gyrotactic microswimmers suspended in homogeneous and isotropic turbulence by using direct numerical simulations (DNS). The swimmers are characterized by three non-dimensional parameters: their aspect ratio…
This paper introduces a methodology for task-specific design optimization of multirotor Micro Aerial Vehicles. By leveraging reinforcement learning, Bayesian optimization, and covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy, we optimize…
For decades, people have been seeking for fishlike flapping motions that can realize underwater propulsion with low energy cost. Complexity of the nonstationary flow field around the flapping body makes this problem very difficult. In…
Minimum-time navigation within constrained and dynamic environments is of special relevance in robotics. Seeking time-optimality, while guaranteeing the integrity of time-varying spatial bounds, is an appealing trade-off for agile vehicles,…
Microscopic robots could perform tasks with high spatial precision, such as acting on precisely-targeted cells in biological tissues. Some tasks may benefit from robots that change shape, such as elongating to improve chemical gradient…
The ROS navigation stack is powerful for mobile robots to move from place to place reliably. The job of navigation stack is to produce a safe path for the robot to execute, by processing data from odometry, sensors and environment map.…
We propose a combined analytical-numerical strategy to predict the dynamics and trajectory of a microswimmer next to a curved spherical obstacle. The microswimmer is actuated by a slip velocity on its surface and a uniformly valid solution…
Robotic locomotion often relies on sequenced gaits to efficiently convert control input into desired motion. Despite extensive studies on gait optimization, achieving smooth and efficient gait transitions remains challenging. In this paper,…
Likelihood-based policy gradient methods are the dominant approach for training robot control policies from rewards. These methods rely on differentiable action likelihoods, which constrain policy outputs to simple distributions like…
We consider active particles swimming in a convergent fluid flow in a trapezoid nozzle with no-slip walls. We use mathematical modeling to analyze trajectories of these particles inside the nozzle. By extensive Monte Carlo simulations, we…