Related papers: Surfing on turbulence: a strategy for planktonic n…

This paper presents a bio-inspired underwater whisker sensor for robust hydrodynamic disturbance detection and efficient signal analysis based on Physical Reservoir Computing (PRC). The design uses a tapered nylon spring with embedded…

Many aquatic organisms are able to track ambient flow disturbances and locate their source. These tasks are particularly challenging because they require the organism to sense local flow information and respond accordingly. Details of how…

Soaring birds gain energy from stable ascending currents or shear. However, it remains unclear whether energy loss due to drag can be overcome by extracting work from transient turbulent fluctuations. We designed numerical simulations of…

Marine organisms manipulate their surrounding flow through their swimming dynamics, which affects the transport of their own odor cues. We demonstrate by direct numerical simulations how a group of swimmers, moving at intermediate Reynolds…

We investigate the scenario that a robot needs to reach a designated goal after taking a sequence of appropriate actions in a non-static environment that is partially structured. One application example is to control a marine vehicle to…

Plankton constitutes the productive base of aquatic ecosystems and plays an essential role in the global carbon cycle. The impact of hydrodynamic conditions on the biological activity of plankton species can manifest in a variety of…

The complex formations exhibited by schooling fish have long been the object of fascination for biologists and physicists. However, the physical and sensory mechanisms leading to organized collective behavior remain elusive. On the physical…

We show that flocking of microswimmers in a turbulent flow can enhance the efficacy of reinforcement-learning-based path-planning of microswimmers in turbulent flows. In particular, we develop a machine-learning strategy that incorporates…

The acoustofluidic method holds great promise for manipulating microorganisms. When exposed to the steady vortex structures of acoustic streaming flow, these microorganisms exhibit intriguing dynamic behaviors, such as hydrodynamic trapping…

Recent research has shown that motile cells can adapt their mode of propulsion to the mechanical properties of the environment in which they find themselves--crawling in some environments while swimming in others. The latter can involve…

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…

We derive from first principles a three-dimensional theory of self-propelled particle swarming in a viscous fluid environment. Our model predicts emergent collective behavior that depends critically on fluid opacity, mechanism of…

Swimming cells and microorganisms must often move though complex fluids that contain an immersed microstructure such as polymer molecules, or filaments. In many important biological processes, such as mammalian reproduction and bacterial…

We examine the motion of rigid, ellipsoidal swimmers subjected to a steady vortex flow in two dimensions. Numerical simulations of swimmers in a spatially periodic array of vortices reveal a range of possible behaviors, including trapping…

This paper presents an approach for learning motion planners that are accompanied with probabilistic guarantees of success on new environments that hold uniformly for any disturbance to the robot's dynamics within an admissible set. We…

The navigation of micro-robots in complex flow environments is controlled by rheotaxis, the reorientation with respect to flow gradients. Here we demonstrate how payloads can be exploited to enhance the motion against flows. Using fully…

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…

Diffusion across surfaces generally involves motion on a vibrating but otherwise stationary substrate. Here, using molecular dynamics, we show that a layered material such as graphene opens up a new mechanism for surface diffusion whereby…

This work aims at finding optimal navigation policies for thin, deformable microswimmers that progress in a viscous fluid by propagating a sinusoidal undulation along their slender body. These active filaments are embedded in a prescribed,…

Identification and extraction of vortical structures and of waves in a disorganised flow is a mayor challenge in the study of turbulence. We present a study of the spatio-temporal behavior of turbulent flows in the presence of different…