Related papers: Limit cycles turn active matter into robots
Mobile soft robots offer compelling applications in fields ranging from urban search and rescue to planetary exploration. A critical challenge of soft robotic control is that the nonlinear dynamics imposed by soft materials often result in…
Active systems of self-propelled agents, e.g., birds, fish, and bacteria, can organize their collective motion into myriad autonomous behaviors. Ubiquitous in nature and across length scales, such phenomena are also amenable to artificial…
The complexity of condensed matter arises from emergent behaviors that cannot be understood by analyzing individual constituents in isolation. While traditional condensed-matter approaches-developed primarily for ideal crystalline…
Living organisms have mastered the dynamic control of internal stresses to perform an array of functions, such as change shape and locomote. State-of-the-art attempts to replicate this ability in synthetic materials are rudimentary in…
Most conventional wheeled robots can only move in flat environments and simply divide their planar workspaces into free spaces and obstacles. Deeming obstacles as non-traversable significantly limits wheeled robots' mobility in real-world,…
The room temperature liquid metal is quickly emerging as an important functional material in a variety of areas like chip cooling, 3D printing or printed electronics etc. With diverse capabilities in electrical, thermal and flowing…
Fast moving classical variables can generate quantum mechanical behavior. We demonstrate how this can happen in a model. The key point is that in classically (ontologically) evolving systems one can still define a conserved quantum energy.…
Many organisms leverage an interplay between shape and activity to generate motion and adapt to their environment. Embedding such feedback into synthetic microrobots could eliminate the need for sensors, software, and actuators, yet current…
This paper introduces novel air actuated spherical robot called "RollRoller". The RollRoller robot consists of two essential parts: tubes covered with a shell as a frame and mechanical controlling parts to correspond movements. The…
Extreme active matter, an assembly of self-propelled particles with large persistence time $\tau_p$ and high P\'eclet number, exhibits remarkable behaviour at high densities. As $\tau_p\to 0$, the assembly undergoes a gradual slowing down…
Collections of simple, self-propelled colloidal particles exhibit complex, emergent dynamical behavior, with promising applications in microrobotics. When confined within a deformable vesicle, self-propelled rods cluster and align,…
Biological systems often involve the self-assembly of basic components into complex and function- ing structures. Artificial systems that mimic such processes can provide a well-controlled setting to explore the principles involved and also…
Robophysics investigates the physical principles that govern living-like robots operating in complex, realworld environments. Despite remarkable technological advances, robots continue to face fundamental efficiency limitations. At the…
The interaction of surfaces in relative motion in wet environments is dominated by lubrication forces, which play a pivotal role in the dynamics of microscopic systems. Here, we develop motile vesicles that exploit lubrication forces to…
Fluctuations and noise may alter the behavior of dynamical systems considerably. For example, oscillations may be sustained by demographic fluctuations in biological systems where a stable fixed point is found in the absence of noise. We…
Biological systems, including human beings, have the innate ability to perform complex tasks in versatile and agile manner. Researchers in sensorimotor control have tried to understand and formally define this innate property. The idea,…
Collective rotations are common in active matter, enhancing cohesion, transport, and mixing. They are typically attributed to chiral non-reciprocal dynamics due to intrinsic particle chirality, torque-generating interactions among units, or…
Rotors are common in nature - from rotating membrane-proteins to superfluid-vortices. Yet, little is known about the collective dynamics of heterogeneous populations of rotors. Here, we show experimentally, numerically, and analytically…
Controlling interfaces of phase separating fluid mixtures is key to creating diverse functional soft materials. Traditionally, this is accomplished with surface-modifying chemical agents. Using experiment and theory, we study how mechanical…
In active matter systems, deformable boundaries provide a mechanism to organize internal active stresses and perform work on the external environment. To study a minimal model of such a system, we perform particle-based simulations of an…