Related papers: Limit cycles turn active matter into robots
Systems consisting of spheres rolling on elastic membranes have been used to introduce a core conceptual idea of General Relativity (GR): how curvature guides the movement of matter. However, such schemes cannot accurately represent…
Robots built from soft materials can alter their shape and size in a particular profile. This shape-changing ability could be extremely helpful for rescue robots and those operating in unknown terrains and environments. In changing shape,…
Transport phenomena in out-of-equilibrium systems is immensely important in a myriad of applications in biology, engineering and physics. Complex environments, such as the cytoplasm or porous media, can substantially affect the transport…
Recent investigations on the longitudinal and lateral control of wheeled autonomous vehicles are reported. Flatness-based techniques are first introduced via a simplified model. It depends on some physical parameters, like cornering…
Active solids consist of elastically coupled out-of-equilibrium units performing work. They are central to autonomous processes, such as locomotion, self-oscillations and rectification, in biological systems,designer materials and robotics.…
Machines enabled the Industrial Revolution and are central to modern technological progress: A machine's parts transmit forces, motion, and energy to one another in a predetermined manner. Today's engineering frontier, building artificial…
Active particles contain internal degrees of freedom with the ability to take in and dissipate energy and, in the process, execute systematic movement. Examples include all living organisms and their motile constituents such as molecular…
Condensation of objects into stable clusters occurs naturally in equilibrium and driven systems. It is commonly held that potential interactions, depletion forces, or sensing are the only mechanisms which can create long-lived compact…
Active matter is one of the hottest topics in physics nowadays. As a prototype of living systems operating in viscous environments it has usually been modeled in terms of the overdamped dynamics. Recently, active matter in the underdamped…
How does nonequilibrium activity modify the approach to a glass? This is an important question, since many experiments reveal the near-glassy nature of the cell interior, remodelled by activity. However, different simulations of dense…
Traditional robotic mechanisms contain a series of rigid links connected by rotational joints that provide powered motion, all of which is controlled by a central processor. By contrast, analogous mechanisms found in nature, such as octopus…
We consider random walkers that deform the medium as they move, enabling a faster motion in regions which have been recently visited. This induces an effective attraction between walkers mediated by the medium, which can be regarded as a…
Robots can rapidly acquire new skills from demonstrations. However, during generalisation of skills or transitioning across fundamentally different skills, it is unclear whether the robot has the necessary knowledge to perform the task.…
We report in experiment and simulation the spontaneous formation of dynamically bound pairs of shape changing robots undergoing locally repulsive collisions. These physical `gliders' robustly emerge from an ensemble of individually…
A wide range of experimental systems including gliding, swarming and swimming bacteria, in-vitro motility assays as well as shaken granular media are commonly described as self-propelled rods. Large ensembles of those entities display a…
Coexistence of order and fluidity in soft matter often mimics that in biology, allowing for complex dynamics and applications like displays. In active soft matter, emergent order can arise because of such dynamics. Powered by local energy…
In these Lecture Notes we aim at clarifying how soft matter physics, and herein notably statistical mechanics and fluid mechanics, can be engaged to understand and manipulate non-equilibrium systems consisting of numerous (microscopic)…
Until recently, the concept of soft robot safety was an informal notion, often attributed solely to the fact that soft robots are less likely to damage their operating environment than rigid robots. As the field moves toward feedback…
Viscous flows are laminar and deterministic. Robust linear laws accurately predict their streamlines in structures as complex as blood vessels, porous media and pipe networks. However, biological and synthetic active fluids defy these…
It is possible that self-induced oscillations appear in reactors, and that their range does not reach the steady state, although such state exists. To prove this, a cascade of tank reactors coupled with mass recycle loop was tested…