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Undulatory slender objects have been a central theme in the hydrodynamics of swimming at low Reynolds number, where the slender body is usually assumed to be inextensible, although some microorganisms and artificial microrobots largely…
Soft robots are made of compliant materials and perform tasks that are challenging for rigid robots. However, their continuum nature makes it difficult to develop model-based control strategies. This work presents a robust model-based…
We suggest a scalar model for deformation and flow of an amorphous material such as a foam or an emulsion. To describe elastic, plastic and viscous behaviours, we use three scalar variables: elastic deformation, plastic deformation rate and…
Any swimmer embedded on a inertialess fluid must perform a non-reciprocal motion to swim forward. The archetypal demonstration of this unique motion-constraint was introduced by Purcell with the so-called "scallop theorem". Scallop here is…
The ciliary locomotion and feeding of an axisymmetric micro-swimmer in a complex fluid whose viscosity depends on nutrient concentration are investigated numerically. The micro-swimmer is modeled as having spheroidal geometry, and ciliary…
Existing numerical models of the swash zone are relatively inflexible in dealing with sediment transport due to a high dependence of the deployed numerical schemes on empirical sediment transport relations. Moreover, these models are…
The hydrodynamics of a flagellated microorganism is investigated when swimming close to a planar free-slip surface by means of numerical solu- tions of the Stokes equations obtained via a Boundary Element Method. Depending on the initial…
Artificial micro-swimmers actuated by external magnetic fields hold significant promise for targeted biomedical applications, including drug delivery and micro-robot-assisted therapy. However, their dynamics remain challenging to control…
We study a linear inviscid model of a passively flexible swimmer with distributed flexibility, calculating its propulsive performance and optimal distributions of flexibility. The frequencies of actuation and mean stiffness ratios we…
Many different microswimmers propel themselves using flagella that beat periodically. The shape of the flagellar beat and swimming speed have been observed to change with fluid rheology. We quantify changes in the flagellar waveforms of…
Micro-swimmers put into motion by a rotating magnetic field have provided interesting challenges both in engineering and in mathematical modelling. We study here the dynamics of a permanent-magnetic rigid body submitted to a…
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…
This article presents a computational approach for determining the optimal slip velocities on any given shape of an axisymmetric micro-swimmer suspended in a viscous fluid. The objective is to minimize the power loss to maintain a target…
Various microswimmers move along circles rather than straight lines due to their swimming mechanisms, body shapes or hydrodynamic effects. Here, we adopt the concepts of stochastic thermodynamics to analyze circle swimmers confined in a…
Serially connected robots are promising candidates for performing tasks in confined spaces such as search-and-rescue in large-scale disasters. Such robots are typically limbless, and we hypothesize that the addition of limbs could improve…
Isolated mechanical systems -- e.g., those floating in space, in free-fall, or on a frictionless surface -- are able to achieve net rotation by cyclically changing their shape, even if they have no net angular momentum. Similarly, swimmers…
A simple nonholonomic dynamics model is developed as a low-order model for generating undulatory swim-like motions, validated through computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. The rigid-body-dynamics model generates swimming motion by…
Aquatic creatures exhibit remarkable adaptations of their body to efficiently interact with the surrounding fluid. The tight coupling between their morphology, motion, and the environment are highly complex but serves as a valuable example…
We consider a low Reynolds number artificial swimmer that consists of an active arm followed by $N$ passive springs separated by spheres. This setup generalizes an approach proposed in Montino and DeSimone, Eur. Phys. J. E, vol. 38, 2015.…
In the 19th International Symposium on Advances in Robot Kinematics the author introduced a novel class of continuous flexible discrete surfaces and mentioned that these so-called P-hedra (or P-nets) allow direct access to their spatial…