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The properties of biological microswimmers are to a large extent determined by fluid-mediated interactions, which govern their propulsion, perception of their surrounding, and the steering of their motion for feeding or in pursuit.…
The quest for the optimal navigation strategy in a complex environment is at the heart of microswimmer applications like cargo carriage or drug targeting to cancer cells. Here, we formulate a variational Fermat's principle for microswimmers…
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…
Finding an optimum strategy to reach a certain destination by swimming in a background flow is an interesting question which leads to non-trivial results and swimming paths. Here we consider different strategies for various types of surface…
Finding the fastest path to a desired destination is a vitally important task for microorganisms moving in a fluid flow. We study this problem by building an analytical formalism for overdamped microswimmers on curved manifolds and…
We use reinforcement learning to find strategies that allow microswimmers in turbulence to avoid regions of large strain. This question is motivated by the hypothesis that swimming microorganisms tend to avoid such regions to minimise the…
We study the energetic efficiency of navigating microswimmers by explicitly taking into account the geometry of their body. We show that, as their shape transitions from prolate to oblate, non-steering microswimmers rotated by flow…
An artificial microswimmer drifts in response to spatio-temporal modulations of an activating suspension medium. We consider two competing mechanisms capable of influencing its tactic response: angular fluctuations, which help it explore…
The question of how "smart" active agents, like insects, microorganisms, or future colloidal robots need to steer to optimally reach or discover a target, such as an odor source, food, or a cancer cell in a complex environment has recently…
Smart active particles can acquire some limited knowledge of the fluid environment from simple mechanical cues and exert a control on their preferred steering direction. Their goal is to learn the best way to navigate by exploiting the…
Marine microorganisms must cope with complex flow patterns and even turbulence as they navigate the ocean. To survive they must avoid predation and find efficient energy sources. A major difficulty in analysing possible survival strategies…
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…
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…
Microswimmers can acquire information on the surrounding fluid by sensing mechanical queues. They can then navigate in response to these signals. We analyse this navigation by combining deep reinforcement learning with direct numerical…
Developing behavioral policies designed to efficiently solve target-search problems is a crucial issue both in nature and in the nanotechnology of the 21st century. Here, we characterize the target-search strategies of simple microswimmers…
We investigate exploration patterns of a microswimmer, modeled as an active Brownian particle, searching for a target region located in a well of an energy landscape and separated from the initial position of the particle by high barriers.…
With the continuing rapid development of artificial microrobots and active particles, questions of microswimmer guidance and control are becoming ever more relevant and prevalent. In both the applications and theoretical study of such…
Artificial microswimmers are a new technology with promising microfluidics and biomedical applications, such as directed cargo transport, microscale assembly, and targeted drug delivery. A fundamental barrier to realising this potential is…
This work aims at finding optimal navigation policies for thin, deformable microswimmers that progress in a viscous fluid by propagating a sinusoidal undulation along their slender body. These active filaments are embedded in a prescribed,…
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…