Related papers: Bridging Walking and Slithering -- Stokesian Locom…
In this work, we analyse the stick-slip motion of a soft elastomeric block on a smooth, hard surface under the application of shear, which is induced by a puller moving at a steady velocity. The frictional stress is generated by make-break…
Cell motility in viscous fluids is ubiquitous and affects many biological processes, including reproduction, infection, and the marine life ecosystem. Here we review the biophysical and mechanical principles of locomotion at the small…
Despite contending with constraints imposed by the environment, morphology, and physiology, animals move well by physically interactingwith the environment to use and transition between modes such as running, climbing, and self-righting. By…
Brownian motion occurs in a variety of fluids, from rare gases to liquids. The Langevin equation, describing friction and agitation forces in statistical balance, is one of the most successful ways to treat the phenomenon. In rare gases, it…
We study the efficiency of sliding locomotion for three-link bodies in the presence of dry (Coulomb) friction. Friction coefficient space can be partitioned into several regions, each with distinct types of efficient kinematics. These…
We report three stages for locomotion of a helical swimmer in yield stress fluids. In the first stage, the swimmer must overcome material's yield strain to generate rotational motion. However, exceeding the first threshold is not sufficient…
Hydrodynamic signatures at the Stokes regime, pertinent to motility of micro-swimmers, have a long-range nature. This implies that movements of an object in such a viscosity-dominated regime, can be felt tens of body-lengths away and…
The slow dynamics for a colloidal suspension of particles interacting with a hard-core repulsion complemented by a short-ranged attraction is discussed within the frame of mode-coupling theory for ideal glass transitions for parameter…
Many small organisms self-propel in viscous fluids using travelling wave-like deformation of their bodies or appendages. Examples include small nematodes moving through soil using whole-body undulations or spermatozoa swimming through mucus…
The folded node is a singularity associated with loss of normal hyperbolicity in systems where mixtures of slow and fast timescales arise due to singular perturbations. Canards are special solutions that reveal a counteractive feature of…
Stochastic processes are commonly used models to describe dynamics of a wide variety of nonequilibrium phenomena ranging from electrical transport to biological motion. The transition matrix describing a stochastic process can be regarded…
Actuating periodically an elastic filament in a viscous liquid generally breaks the constraints of Purcell's scallop theorem, resulting in the generation of a net propulsive force. This observation suggests a method to design simple…
In this paper, we present a new model of biped locomotion which is composed of three linear pendulums (one per leg and one for the whole upper body) to describe stance, swing and torso dynamics. In addition to double support, this model has…
Biological adhesion is a critical mechanical function of complex organisms operating at multiple scales. At the cellular scale, cell-cell adhesion is remarkably tunable to enable both cohesion and malleability during development,…
To traverse complex natural terrain, animals often transition between locomotor modes. It is well known that locomotor transitions can be induced by switching in neural control circuits or be driven by a need to minimize metabolic energetic…
Classical Stokes' drift is the small time-averaged drift velocity of suspended non-diffusing particles in a fluid due to the presence of a wave. We consider the effect of adding diffusion to the motion of the particles, and show in…
Geometric mechanics models of locomotion have provided insight into how robots and animals use environmental interactions to convert internal shape changes into displacement through the world, encoding this relationship in a ``motility…
While Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved remarkable progress in legged locomotion control, it often suffers from performance degradation in out-of-distribution (OOD) conditions and discrepancies between the simulation and the real…
Piecewise smooth dynamical systems make use of discontinuities to model switching between regions of smooth evolution. This introduces an ambiguity in prescribing dynamics at the discontinuity: should it be given by a limiting value on one…
A propagating "beam" triggering a local phase transition in a nematic elastomer sets it into a crawling motion, which may morph due to buckling. We consider the motion of the various configurations of slender rods and thin stripes with both…