Related papers: Bridging Walking and Slithering -- Stokesian Locom…

We investigate the motion of a flexible Stokesean flagellar swimmer realised as a yarn made of two intertwined elastomer fibres, one active, that can reversibly change its length in response to a local excitation causing transition to the…

Slender bodies capable of spontaneous motion in the absence of external actuation in an otherwise quiescent fluid are common in biological, physical and technological contexts. The interplay between the spontaneous fluid flow, Brownian…

Motivated by the intriguing motility of spirochetes (helically-shaped bacteria that screw through viscous fluids due to the action of internal periplasmic flagella), we examine the fundamental fluid dynamics of superhelices translating and…

The unsteady motion of a gas-liquid interface, such as during splashing or atomization, often results in complex liquid structures embedded in the ambient fluid. Here we explore the use of skeletonization to identify the minimum amount of…

Rectilinear crawling locomotion is a primitive and common mode of locomotion in slender, soft-bodied animals. It requires coordinated contractions that propagate along a body that interacts frictionally with its environment. We propose a…

Models of bipedal locomotion are hybrid, with a continuous component often generated by a Lagrangian plus actuators, and a discrete component where leg transfer takes place. The discrete component typically consists of a locally embedded…

Most classical work on the hydrodynamics of low-Reynolds-number swimming addresses deterministic locomotion in quiescent environments. Thermal fluctuations in fluids are known to lead to a Brownian loss of the swimming direction. As most…

Swimming fish and flying insects use the flapping of fins and wings to generate thrust. In contrast, microscopic organisms typically deform their appendages in a wavelike fashion. Since a flapping motion with two degrees of freedom is able,…

The swimming velocity and rate of dissipation of a linear chain consisting of two or three little spheres and a big sphere is studied on the basis of low Reynolds number hydrodynamics. The big sphere is treated as a passive cargo, driven by…

The mechanism of swimming at very low Reynolds number conditions is a topic of interest to biologists and engineering community. We develop a novel kinematic model of a slender flexible swimmer which locomotes in a low Reynolds number…

We propose a geometric model for optimal shape-change-induced motions of slender locomotors, e.g., snakes slithering on sand. In these scenarios, the motion of a body in world coordinates is completely determined by the sequence of shapes…

Generating stable walking gaits that yield natural locomotion when executed on robotic-assistive devices is a challenging task that often requires hand-tuning by domain experts. This paper presents an alternative methodology, where we…

A method to couple interparticle contact models with Stokesian dynamics (SD) is introduced to simulate colloidal aggregates under flow conditions. The contact model mimics both the elastic and plastic behavior of the cohesive connections…

Why do we move forward when we walk? Our legs undergo periodic motion and thus possess no net change in position; however, our bodies do possess a net change in position and we are propelled forward. From a geometric perspective, this…

Optimal gait design is important for micro-organisms and micro-robots that propel themselves in a fluid environment in the absence of external force or torque. The simplest models of shape changes are those that comprise a series of…

Rapid transduction of sensory stimulation to action is essential for an animal to survive. To this end, most animals use the sub-second excitable and multistable dynamics of a neuromuscular system. Here, studying an animal without neurons…

During the wear process of surfaces in sliding friction, there is a running-in period during which the topography of surfaces changes with time before reaching the steady wear regime. In the steady wear regime, the statistical parameters…

Organisms often swim through fluids that are spatially inhomogeneous. If the fluids are polymeric, gradients in polymer concentration may lead to gradients in both fluid viscosity and elasticity. In this letter, we present theoretical…

We address the challenge of effectively controlling the locomotion of legged robots by incorporating precise frequency and phase characteristics, which is often ignored in locomotion policies that do not account for the periodic nature of…

Lubrication forces depend to a high degree on elasticity, texture, charge, chemistry, and temperature of the interacting surfaces. Therefore, by appropriately designing surface properties, we may tailor lubrication forces to reduce…