Related papers: Control and controllability of microswimmers by a …
Controlling the swimming behavior of bacteria is crucial, for example, to prevent contamination of ducts and catheters. We show the bacteria modeled by deformable microswimmers can accumulate in flows through straight microchannels either…
The use of tank-treading as a means of propulsion for microswimmers in viscous shear flows is taken into exam. We discuss the possibility that a vesicle be able to control the drift in an external shear flow, by varying locally the bending…
Biological microswimmers often encounter deformable boundaries in physiological conditions; for instance, the viscoelastic walls of reproductive tract during migration of spermatozoa, or host tissue during early bacterial biofilm formation.…
Microswimmers are exposed in nature to crowded environments and their transport properties depend in a subtle way on the interaction with obstacles. Here, we investigate a model for a single ideal circle swimmer exploring a two-dimensional…
We review recent advances in rectification control of artificial microswimmers, also known as Janus particles, diffusing along narrow, periodically corrugated channels. The swimmer self-propulsion mechanism is modeled so as to incorporate a…
The controllability of passive microparticles that are advected with the fluid flow generated by an actively controlled one is studied. The particles are assumed to be suspended in a viscous fluid and well separated so that the far-field…
We study different types of microswimmers moving in channels with varying cross section and thereby interacting hydrodynamically with the channel walls. Starting from the Smoluchowski equation for a dilute suspension, for which interactions…
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…
Natural swimmers rely for their survival on sensors that gather information from the environment and guide their actions. The spatial organization of these sensors, such as the visual fish system and lateral line, suggests evolutionary…
There are numerous ways to control objects in the Stokes regime, with microscale examples ranging from the use of optical tweezers to the application of external magnetic fields. In contrast, there are relatively few explorations of…
Microorganisms ofter move in confined, disordered environments, where hydrodynamic couplings can modify their transport behavior. Using extensive finite-element simulations, we investigate the dynamics of microswimmers -- modeled as…
Microorganisms living in microfluidic environments often form multi-species swarms, where they can leverage collective motions to achieve enhanced transport and spreading. Nevertheless, there is a general lack of physical understandings of…
Navigating in a fluid flow while being carried by it, using only information accessible from on-board sensors, is a problem commonly faced by small planktonic organisms. It is also directly relevant to autonomous robots deployed in the…
In this review, we provide a theoretical introduction to Jeffery's equations for the orientation dynamics of an axisymmetric object in a flow at low Reynolds number, and review recent theoretical extensions and applications to the motions…
Micro-organisms expend energy moving through complex media. While propulsion speed is an important property of locomotion, efficiency is another factor that may determine the swimming gait adopted by a micro-organism in order to locomote in…
Self-propelled micron-size particles suspended in a fluid, like bacteria or synthetic microswimmers, are strongly non-equilibrium systems where particle motility breaks the microscopic detailed balance, often resulting in large-scale…
In nature, metachronal coordination is an efficient strategy for fluid pumping and self-propulsion. Yet, mimetic systems for this type of organization are scarce. Recently, metachronal motion was observed in a bead-based magnetocapillary…
Microorganisms and synthetic microswimmers often encounter complex environments consisting of networks of obstacles embedded into viscous fluids. Such settings include biological media, such as mucus with filamentous networks, as well as…
This paper addresses the problem of obtaining low-order models of fluid flows for the purpose of designing robust feedback controllers. This is challenging since whilst many flows are governed by a set of nonlinear, partial…
The problem of optimal microscopic swimming in a noisy environment is analyzed. A simplified model in which propulsion is generated by the relative motion of three spheres connected by immaterial links has been considered. We show that an…