Related papers: Learning to swim in potential flow
The complex formations exhibited by schooling fish have long been the object of fascination for biologists and physicists. However, the physical and sensory mechanisms leading to organized collective behavior remain elusive. On the physical…
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…
It has been a long-standing problem how schooling fish optimize their motion by exploiting the vortices shed by the others. A recent experimental study showed that a pair of fish reduce energy consumption by matching the phases of their…
Bionic underwater robots have demonstrated their superiority in many applications. Yet, training their intelligence for a variety of tasks that mimic the behavior of underwater creatures poses a number of challenges in practice, mainly due…
Underwater vehicles are employed in the exploration of dynamic environments where tuning of a specific controller for each task would be time-consuming and unreliable as the controller depends on calculated mathematical coefficients in…
Many biological fluids are composed of suspended polymers immersed in a viscous fluid. A prime example is mucus, where the polymers are also known to form a network. While the presence of this microstructure is linked with an overall…
Motion retargeting holds a premise of offering a larger set of motion data for characters and robots with different morphologies. Many prior works have approached this problem via either handcrafted constraints or paired motion datasets,…
In this work, we explore a data-driven learning-based approach to learning the kinodynamic model of a small autonomous vehicle, and observe the effect it has on motion planning, specifically autonomous drifting. When executing a motion plan…
Fish swimming style and schooling behaviour are two important aspects of underwater locomotion. How swimming style affects fish schooling is investigated by a representative problem setup consisting of two tethered NACA0012 hydrofoils…
The ability of microswimmers to deploy optimal propulsion strategies is of paramount importance for their locomotory performance and survival at low Reynolds numbers. Although for perfectly spherical swimmers minimum dissipation requires a…
Extracting information on fluid motion directly from images is challenging. Fluid flow represents a complex dynamic system governed by the Navier-Stokes equations. General optical flow methods are typically designed for rigid body motion,…
In this work we propose an approach to learn a robust policy for solving the pivoting task. Recently, several model-free continuous control algorithms were shown to learn successful policies without prior knowledge of the dynamics of the…
The move to high performance applications greatly increases the demand to produce large instantaneous fluid forces for high-speed maneuvering and improved power efficiency for sustained propulsion. Animals achieve remarkable feats of…
Floating-base multi-link robots can change their shape during flight, making them well-suited for applications in confined environments such as autonomous inspection and search and rescue. However, trajectory planning for such systems…
Contrasting the well explored problem on how to steer a macroscopic agent like an airplane or a moon lander to optimally reach a target, "optimal microswimming", i.e. the quest for the optimal navigation strategy for microswimmers, remains…
Fluid dynamics, and flight in particular, is a domain where organisms challenge our understanding of its physics. Integrating the current knowledge of animal flight, we propose to revisit the use of live animals to study physical phenomena.…
We introduce a new concept for the manipulation of fluid flow around three-dimensional bodies. Inspired by transformation optics, the concept is based on a mathematical idea of coordinate transformations and physically implemented with…
Reinforcement learning methods as a promising technique have achieved superior results in the motion planning of free-floating space robots. However, due to the increase in planning dimension and the intensification of system dynamics…
In marine plankton, many swimming species can perceive their environment with flow sensors. Can they use this flow information to travel faster in turbulence? To address this question, we consider plankters swimming at constant speed, whose…
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…