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Various microorganisms and some mammalian cells are able to swim in viscous fluids by performing nonreciprocal body deformations, such as rotating attached flagella or by distorting their entire body. In order to perform chemotaxis, i.e. to…
Competition between biological species in marine environments is affected by the motion of the surrounding fluid. An effective 2D compressibility can arise, for example, from the convergence and divergence of water masses at the depth at…
A theory is presented for wave-driven propulsion of floating bodies driven into oscillation at the fluid interface. By coupling the equations of motion of the body to a quasi-potential flow model of the fluid, we derive expressions for the…
Animals learn to adapt speed of their movements to their capabilities and the environment they observe. Mobile robots should also demonstrate this ability to trade-off aggressiveness and safety for efficiently accomplishing tasks. The aim…
The dynamics of a triangular magnetocapillary swimmer is studied using the lattice Boltzmann method. Performing extensive numerical simulations taking into account the coupled dynamics of the fluid-fluid interface and of magnetic particles…
Swimming microorganisms often have to propel in complex, non-Newtonian fluids. We carry out experiments with self-propelling helical swimmers driven by an externally rotating magnetic field in shear-thinning, inelastic fluids. Similarly to…
Particles moving along curved trajectories will diffuse if the curvature fluctuates sufficiently in either magnitude or orientation. We consider particles moving at a constant speed with either a fixed or with a Gaussian distributed…
Microorganisms are rarely found in Nature swimming freely in an unbounded fluid. Instead, they typically encounter other organisms, hard walls, or deformable boundaries such as free interfaces or membranes. Hydrodynamic interactions between…
Swimming micro-organisms such as flagellated bacteria and sperm cells have fascinating locomotion capabilities. Inspired by their natural motion, there is an ongoing effort to develop artificial robotic nano-swimmers for potential in-body…
Motile microorganisms develop effective swimming gaits to adapt to complex biological environments. Translating this adaptability to smart microrobots presents significant challenges in motion planning and stroke design. In this work, we…
The quest for the optimal navigation strategy in a complex environment is at the heart of microswimmer applications like cargo carriage or drug targeting to cancer cells. Here, we formulate a variational Fermat's principle for microswimmers…
We develop an adversarial-reinforcement learning scheme for microswimmers in statistically homogeneous and isotropic turbulent fluid flows, in both two (2D) and three dimensions (3D). We show that this scheme allows microswimmers to find…
This paper presents aims at mobility improvement of flexible underwater robots. For this purpose, a novel propulsion method using planar structural vibration pattern is proposed, and tested on two kinds of prototypes. The result of…
Transitions from turbulence to order are studied experimentally in thin fluid layers and magnetically confined toroidal plasma. It is shown that turbulence self-organizes through the mechanism of spectral condensation. The spectral…
Purcell's scallop theorem states that swimmers deforming their shapes in a time-reversible manner ("reciprocal" motion) cannot swim. Using numerical simulations and theoretical calculations we show here that in a fluctuating environment,…
Unmanned underwater vehicles are increasingly employed for maintenance and surveying tasks at sea, but their operation in shallow waters is often hindered by hydrodynamic disturbances such as waves, currents, and turbulence. These unsteady…
Commonplace in oceanography is the collection of ocean drifter positions. Ocean drifters are devices that sit on the surface of the ocean and move with the flow, transmitting their position via GPS to stations on land. Using drifter data,…
The swimming of a deformable planar slab in a viscous incompressible fluid is studied on the basis of the Navier-Stokes equations. A continuum of plane wave displacements, symmetric on both sides of the slab and characterized by a…
While deep learning has shown tremendous success in a wide range of domains, it remains a grand challenge to incorporate physical principles in a systematic manner to the design, training, and inference of such models. In this paper, we aim…
Flexible plants, fungi, and sessile animals are thought to reconfigure in the wind and water to reduce the drag forces that act upon them. In strong winds, for example, leaves roll up into cone shapes that reduce flutter and drag when…