Related papers: Tuning upstream swimming of micro-robots by shape …
Synthetic microswimmers mimicking biological movements at the microscale have been developed in recent years. Actuating helical magnetic materials with a homogeneous rotating magnetic field is one of the most widespread techniques for…
Microswimmers are encountered in a wide variety of biophysical settings. When interacting with flow fields, they show interesting dynamical features such as trapping, clustering, and preferential orientation. One important step towards the…
Objects moving in fluids experience patterns of stress on their surfaces determined by the geometry of nearby boundaries. Flows at low Reynolds number, as occur in microscopic vessels such as capillaries in biological tissues, have…
Efficient navigation and precise localization of Brownian micro/nano self-propelled motor particles within complex landscapes could enable future high-tech applications involving for example drug delivery, precision surgery, oil recovery,…
Self-propelled microparticles create flow fields that determine how they interact with surfaces, external flows, and each other. These flow fields fall into distinct classes--pushers, pullers, and neutral swimmers--each exhibiting…
This study proposes the topology optimization method for moving rigid bodies subjected to forces from fluid flow, such as sails and turbines, with an unsteady time-dependent formulation. Unlike existing topology optimization frameworks in…
Achieving macroscopic directed migration of microscale swimmers in a fluid is an important step towards utilizing their autonomous motion. It has been experimentally shown that directed motion can be induced, without any external fields, by…
Vine robots extend their tubular bodies by everting material from the tip, enabling navigation in complex environments with a minimalist soft body. Despite their promise for field applications, especially in the urban search and rescue…
Modeling and controlling fluid flows is critical for several fields of science and engineering, including transportation, energy, and medicine. Effective flow control can lead to, e.g., lift increase, drag reduction, mixing enhancement, and…
The self-propelled motion of microscopic bodies immersed in a fluid medium is studied using molecular dynamics simulation. The advantage of the atomistic approach is that the detailed level of description allows complete freedom in…
Microswimmers, and among them aspirant microrobots, generally have to cope with flows where viscous forces are dominant, characterized by a low Reynolds number ($Re$). This implies constraints on the possible sequences of body motion, which…
Wearable robots are limited by their actuators performances because they must bear the weight of their own power system and energy source. This paper explores the idea of leveraging hybrid modes to meet multiple operating points with a…
The aim of this paper is to describe the self-propulsion of a micro-robot (or micro-swimmer) consisting of $N$ spheres moving along a fixed line. The spheres are linked to each other by arms with the lengths changing periodically. For the…
This paper presents a hybrid approach that integrates trajectory optimization (TO) and reinforcement learning (RL) for motion planning and control of free-flying multi-arm robots in on-orbit servicing scenarios. The proposed system…
Humanoid robots could benefit from using their upper bodies for support contacts, enhancing their workspace, stability, and ability to perform contact-rich and pushing tasks. In this paper, we propose a unified approach that combines an…
For natural microswimmers, the interplay of swimming activity and external flow can promote robust motion, e.g. propulsion against ("upstream rheotaxis") or perpendicular to the direction of flow. These effects are generally attributed to…
Field-based reactive control provides a minimalist, decentralized route to guiding robots that lack onboard computation. Such schemes are well suited to resource-limited machines like microrobots, yet implementation artifacts, limited…
Flagellated microorganisms can swim at low Reynolds numbers and adapt to changes in their environment. Specifically, the flagella can switch their shapes or modes through gene expression. In the past decade, efforts have been made to…
Trajectory tracking for microswimmers remains a key challenge in microrobotics, where low-Reynolds-number dynamics make control design particularly complex. In this work, we formulate the trajectory tracking problem as an optimal control…
In nature, metachronal coordination is an efficient strategy for fluid pumping and self-propulsion. Yet, mimetic systems for this type of organization are scarce. Recently, metachronal motion was observed in a bead-based magnetocapillary…