Related papers: Nematic colloidal micro-robots as physically intel…
We perform dynamical simulations of a two-dimensional active nematic fluid in coexistence with an isotropic fluid. Drops of active nematic become elongated, and an effective anchoring develops at the nematic-isotropic interface. The…
An important function of autonomous microrobots is the ability to perform robust movement over terrain. This paper explores an edge ML approach to microrobot locomotion, allowing for on-device, lower latency control under compute, memory,…
Walking animals, like stick insects, cockroaches or ants, demonstrate a fascinating range of locomotive abilities and complex behaviors. The locomotive behaviors can consist of a variety of walking patterns along with adaptation that allow…
The exploration of intelligent machines has recently spurred the development of physical neural networks, a class of intelligent metamaterials capable of learning, whether in silico or in situ, from observed data. In this study, we…
Active nematic systems consist of rod-like internally driven subunits that interact with one another to form large-scale coherent flows. They are important examples of far-from-equilibrium fluids, which exhibit a wealth of nonlinear…
The increasing number of protein-based metamaterials demands reliable and efficient theoretical and computational methods to study the physicochemical properties they may display. In this regard, we develop a simulation strategy based on…
The topological properties of many materials are central to their behavior, with the dynamics of topological defects being particularly important to intrinsically out-of-equilibrium, active materials. In this paper, local manipulation of…
In-Motion physical coupling of multiple mobile ground robots has the potential to enable new applications like in-motion transfer that improves efficiency in handling and transferring goods, which tackles current challenges in logistics. A…
Soft robots offer an alternative approach to manipulate inside the constrained space while maintaining the safe interaction with the external environment. Due to its adaptable compliance characteristic, external contact force can easily…
Active fluids, such as cytoskeletal filaments, bacterial colonies and epithelial cell layers, exhibit distinctive orientational coherence, often characterized by nematic order and topological defects. By contrast, little is known about…
Concentrated colloidal suspensions of nanorods often exhibit liquid-crystalline (LC) behavior. The transition to a nematic LC phase, with long-range orientational order of the particles, is usually well captured by Onsager's theory for hard…
Motivated by recent experiments, the isotropic-nematic phase transition in chromonic liquid crystals is studied. As temperature decreases, nematic nuclei nucleate, grow, and coalesce, giving rise to tactoid microstructures in an isotropic…
Materials that respond to external stimuli by expanding or contracting provide a transduction route that integrates sensing and actuation powered directly by the stimuli. This motivates us to build colloidal scale robots using these…
Rigid body interactions are fundamental to numerous scientific disciplines, but remain challenging to simulate due to their abrupt nonlinear nature and sensitivity to complex, often unknown environmental factors. These challenges call for…
Cholesteric liquid crystal elastomers (CLCEs) change color under strain, offering attractive prospects for smart textiles, soft robotics, and photonic devices. However, the helical structure of CLCEs averages out the exceptional anisotropy…
Robotic collaborative carrying could greatly benefit human activities like warehouse and construction site management. However, coordinating the simultaneous motion of multiple robots represents a significant challenge. Existing works…
Specialized motions such as jumping are often achieved on quadruped robots by solving a trajectory optimization problem once and executing the trajectory using a tracking controller. This approach is in parallel with Model Predictive…
We use numerical simulations to investigate the hydrodynamic behavior of the interface between nematic (N) and isotropic (I) phases of a confined active liquid crystal. At low activities, a stable interface with constant shape and velocity…
Magnetic microrobots have been developed for navigating microscale environments by means of remote magnetic fields. However, limited propulsion speeds at small scales remain an issue in the maneuverability of these devices as magnetic force…
Motile liquid crystal (LC) colloids show peculiar behavior due to the high sensitivity to external stimuli driven by the LC elastic and surface effects. However, few studies focus on harnessing the LC phase transitions to propel colloidal…