Related papers: Control and controllability of microswimmers by a …
Micro-organisms usually can swim in their liquid environment by flagellar or ciliary beating. In this numerical work, we analyze the influence of flagellar beating on the orbits of a swimming cell in a shear flow. We also calculate the…
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…
We investigate the dynamics of model microswimmers under confinement, in cylindrical geometries, by means of three dimensional direct numerical calculations with fully resolved hydrodynamics. Such swimmers are known to show collective…
We explore the applicability of recent advances in formation control theory and robust network analysis to the problem of designing streamer-free marine seismic surveys. To this end, we carry out a theoretical and numerical feasibility…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) of robotic manipulation skills, despite its impressive successes, stands to benefit from incorporating domain knowledge from control theory. One of the most important properties that is of interest is control…
It is known that obstacles can hydrodynamically trap bacteria and synthetic microswimmers in orbits, where the trapping time heavily depends on the swimmer flow field and noise is needed to escape the trap. Here, we use experiments and…
We formulate and solve the equations governing the dynamics of a microscopic artificial swimmer composed of a head and of a tail made of a thin film of permanent magnetic material. This is a variant of the model swimmer proposed by Dreyfus…
Effective robot navigation in unseen environments is a challenging task that requires precise control actions at high frequencies. Recent advances have framed it as an image-goal-conditioned control problem, where the robot generates…
We describe a microfluidic device for studying the orientational dynamics of microrods. The device enables us to experimentally investigate the tumbling of microrods immersed in the shear flow in a microfluidic channel with a depth of 400…
Micro Autonomous Surface Vehicles (MicroASVs) offer significant potential for operations in confined or shallow waters and swarm robotics applications. However, achieving precise and robust control at such small scales remains highly…
This paper focuses on the mechanism of propulsion of a Purcell swimmer whose segments are magnetized and react to an external magnetic field applied into the fluid. By an asymptotic analysis, we prove that it is possible to steer the…
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…
We investigate how ferrofluid droplets suspended in a wall-bounded shear flow can organise when subjected to an external magnetic field. By tuning the magnitude of the external magnetic field, we find that the ferrofluid droplets form…
The use of soft and compliant manipulators in marine environments represents a promising paradigm shift for subsea inspection, with devices better suited to tasks owing to their ability to safely conform to items during contact. However,…
Microswimmers exhibit noisy circular motion due to asymmetric propulsion mechanisms, their chiral body shape, or by hydrodynamic couplings in the vicinity of surfaces. Here, we employ the Brownian circle swimmer model and characterize…
Powered by acoustics, existing therapeutic and diagnostic procedures will become less invasive and new methods will become available that have never been available before. Acoustically driven microrobot navigation based on microbubbles is a…
We study the dynamics of gyrotactic microswimmers suspended in homogeneous and isotropic turbulence by using direct numerical simulations (DNS). The swimmers are characterized by three non-dimensional parameters: their aspect ratio…
Suspensions of swimming micro-organisms are known to undergo intricate collective dynamics as a result of hydrodynamic and collision interactions. Micro-swimmers, such as bacteria and micro-algae, naturally live and have evolved in complex…
Despite their importance in many biological, ecological and physical processes, microorganismal fluid flows under tight confinement have not been investigated experimentally. Strong screening of Stokelets in this geometry suggests that the…
In this paper, we study the approximate controllability of a system governed by an evolution problem known as the sloshing problem. This problem involves a spatial, nonlocal differential operator inherent in the dynamics of a…