Related papers: Control and controllability of microswimmers by a …

Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are no good dynamic simulation tools to predict the motion or performance of a microrobot as it moves against a substrate. At…

A self-propelled artificial microswimmer is often modeled as a ballistic Brownian particle moving with constant speed aligned along one of its axis, but changing direction due to random collisions with the environment. Similarly to thermal…

Both natural and artificial small-scale swimmers may often self-propel in environments subject to complex geometrical constraints. While most past theoretical work on low-Reynolds number locomotion addressed idealised geometrical…

Many soft-body organisms found in nature flourish underwater. Similarly, soft robots are potentially well-suited for underwater environments partly because the problematic effects of gravity, friction, and harmonic oscillations are less…

Persistent motion of microswimmers near boundaries is known to result in surface accumulation. Recently it was shown experimentally that surface accumulation of microswimmers is impacted primarily by steric forces and short-ranged…

We explore in this paper the phenomenon of photofocusing: a coupling between flow vorticity and biased swimming of microalgae toward a light source that produces a focusing of the microswimmer suspension. We combine experiments that…

Most aquatic vertebrates swim by lateral flapping of their bodies and caudal fins. While much effort has been devoted to understanding the flapping kinematics and its influence on the swimming efficiency, little is known about the stability…

The motion of submerged magnetic microspheres rolling at a glass-water interface has been studied using magnetic rotation and optical tweezers combined with bright-field microscopy particle tracking techniques. Individual microspheres of…

Current developments in molecular electronics, motors and chemical sensors could enable constructing large numbers of devices able to sense, compute and act in micron-scale environments. Such microscopic machines, of sizes comparable to…

Synthetic microswimmers show great promise in biomedical applications such as drug delivery and microsurgery. Their locomotion, however, is subject to stringent constraints due to the dominance of viscous over inertial forces at low…

Many recent machine learning models rely on fine-grained dynamic control flow for training and inference. In particular, models based on recurrent neural networks and on reinforcement learning depend on recurrence relations, data-dependent…

In this article, we have developed a computational model to determine the droplet formation regime and its transition in a square microfluidic flow-focusing device that eventually dictate the droplet shape, size, and its formation…

The dynamics of a triangular magnetocapillary swimmer is studied using the lattice Boltzmann method. Performing extensive numerical simulations taking into account the coupled dynamics of the fluid-fluid interface and of magnetic particles…

Biological and artificial microswimmers often self-propel in external flows of vortical nature; relevant examples include algae in small-scale ocean eddies, spermatozoa in uterine peristaltic flows and bacteria in microfluidic devices. A…

We consider the dynamics of a microswimmer and show that they can be approximated by active Brownian motion. The swimmer is modeled by coupled overdamped Langevin equations with periodic driving. We compare the energy dissipation of the…

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…

Motion planning for underwater vehicles must consider the effect of ocean currents. We present an efficient method to compute reachability and cost between sample points in sampling-based motion planning that supports long-range planning…

Existence of optimal solutions and necessary optimality conditions for a controlled version of Moreau's sweeping process are derived. The control is a measurable ingredient of the dynamics and the constraint set is a polyhedron. The novelty…

A conformation space kinetic model is constructed to drive the deformation cycle of a three-sphere swimmer to achieve propulsion at low Reynolds number. We analyze the effect of an external load on the performance of this kinetic swimmer,…

Hydrodynamic interactions are crucial for determining the cooperative behavior of microswimmers at low Reynolds numbers. Here we provide a comprehensive analysis of the scaling and strength of the interactions in the case of a pair of…