Related papers: Self-Healing Small-Scale Swimmers
Shape morphing magnetic soft materials, composed of magnetic particles in a soft polymer matrix, can transform shapes reversibly, remotely, and rapidly, finding diverse applications in actuators, soft robotics, and biomedical devices. To…
Microswimmers (planktonic microorganisms or artificial active particles) immersed in a fluid interact with the ambient flow, altering their trajectories. In surface gravity waves, a common goal for microswimmers is vertical migration (e.g.,…
Soft robotics has the potential to revolutionize robotic locomotion, in particular, soft robotic swimmers offer a minimally invasive and adaptive solution to explore and preserve our oceans. Unfortunately, current soft robotic swimmers are…
Ciliated microswimmers and flagellated bacteria alter their swimming trajectories to follow the direction of an applied electric field exhibiting electrotaxis. Both for matters of application and physical modelling, it is instructive to…
A robot's mechanical parts routinely wear out from normal functioning and can be lost to injury. For autonomous robots operating in isolated or hostile environments, repair from a human operator is often not possible. Thus, much work has…
In this manuscript we describe the realization of a minimal hybrid microswimmer, composed of a ferromagnetic nanorod and a paramagnetic microsphere. The unbounded pair is propelled in water upon application of a swinging magnetic field that…
Locomotion and transport of microorganisms in fluids is an essential aspect of life. Search for food, orientation toward light, spreading of off-spring, and the formation of colonies are only possible due to locomotion. Swimming at the…
Self-healing -- the ability of a structured beam to reconstruct its transverse profile after partial obstruction -- has been demonstrated for diffraction-free beams, where the recovery distance varies continuously with obstruction size.…
A paradigmatic microswimmer is the three-linked-spheres model, which follows a minimalist approach for propulsion by shape shifting. As such, it has been the subject of numerous analytical and numerical studies. In this Rapid Communication,…
We study the local controllability properties of 2D and 3D bio-mimetic swimmers employing the change of their geometric shape to propel themselves in an incompressible fluid described by Navier-Stokes equations. It is assumed that swimmers'…
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,…
Morphological regeneration is an important feature that highlights the environmental adaptive capacity of biological systems. Lack of this regenerative capacity significantly limits the resilience of machines and the environments they can…
We study the properties of arbitrary micro-swimmers towing a passive load through a viscous liquid. The simple close-form expression for the dragging efficiency of a general micro-swimmer dragging a distant load is found, and the leading…
Self-propelling particles or microswimmers have opened a new field of investigation with both fundamental and practical perspectives. They represent very convenient model objects for experimental studies of active matter, and have…
Microscopic artificial swimmers have recently become highly attractive due to their promising potential for biomedical applications. The pioneering work of Dreyfus et al (2005) has demonstrated the motion of a microswimmer with an…
The field of active matter in general and microswimming in particular has experienced a rapid and ongoing expansion over the last decade. A particular interesting aspect is provided by artificial autonomous microswimmers constructed from…
Viscoelasticity governs the locomotion strategies of deformable microorganisms, rendering it a fundamental mechanical property of microbial motility and an integral component in the design of envisioned microbots. Recent studies have shown…
Coordinating micro-robotic swarms in physiologically realistic, time-dependent fluid environments remains an unsolved challenge for biomedical and environmental applications. We present a hybrid Computational Fluid Dynamics -…
Biofilms are spatially organized microorganism colonies embedded in a self-produced matrix, conferring to the microbial community resistance to environmental stresses. Motile bacteria have been observed swimming in the matrix of pathogenic…
We theoretically study the self-propulsion of a thin (slender) colloid driven by asymmetric chemical reactions on its surface at vanishing Reynolds number. Using the method of matched asymptotic expansions, we obtain the colloid…