Related papers: Optimal Locomotion for Limbless Crawlers
Many fascinating properties of biological active matter crucially depend on the capacity of constituting entities to perform directed motion, e.g., molecular motors transporting vesicles inside cells or bacteria searching for food. While…
Cell crawling requires the generation of intracellular forces by the cytoskeleton and their transmission to an extracellular substrate through specific adhesion molecules. Crawling cells show many features of excitable systems, such as…
Cell motility in higher organisms (eukaryotes) is crucial to biological functions ranging from wound healing to immune response, and also implicated in diseases such as cancer. For cells crawling on hard surfaces, significant insights into…
Micro-robots for, e.g., biomedical applications, need to be equipped with motility strategies that enable them to navigate through complex environments. Inspired by biological microorganisms we recreate motility patterns such as…
Elongate animals and robots use undulatory body waves to locomote through diverse environments. Geometric mechanics provides a framework to model and optimize such systems in highly damped environments, connecting a prescribed shape change…
We formulate and solve the locomotion problem for a bio-inspired crawler consisting of two active elastic segments (i.e., capable of changing their rest lengths), resting on three supports providing directional frictional interactions. The…
One of simplest examples of navigation found in nature is run-and-tumble chemotaxis. Tumbles reorient cells randomly, and cells can drift toward attractants or away from repellents by biasing the frequency of these events. The post-tumble…
Although typically possessing four limbs and short bodies, lizards have evolved a diversity of body plans, from short-bodied and fully-limbed to elongate and nearly limbless. Such diversity in body morphology is hypothesized as adaptations…
Undulatory locomotion is a means of self-propulsion that relies on the generation and propagation of waves along a body. As a mode of locomotion it is primitive and relatively simple, yet can be remarkably robust. No wonder then, that it is…
Inspired by spiking neural feedback, we propose a spiking controller for efficient locomotion in a soft robotic crawler. Its bistability, akin to neural fast positive feedback, combined with a sensorimotor slow negative feedback loop,…
Inspired by how the shape deformations in active organisms help them to migrate through disordered porous environments, we simulate active ring polymers in two-dimensional random porous media. Flexible and inextensible active ring polymers…
We extend a model for the morphology and dynamics of a crawling eukaryotic cell to describe cells on micropatterned substrates. This model couples cell morphology, adhesion, and cytoskeletal flow in response to active stresses induced by…
Microorganisms often encounter strong confinement and complex hydrodynamic flows while navigating their habitats. Combining finite-element methods and stochastic simulations, we study the interplay of active transport and heterogeneous…
We studied locomotion of a crawler on a thin Newtonian fluid film whose viscosity varied spatially. We first derived a general locomotion velocity formula with fluid viscosity variations via the lubrication theory. For further analysis, the…
Self-propelling organisms locomote via generation of patterns of self-deformation. Despite the diversity of body plans, internal actuation schemes and environments in limbless vertebrates and invertebrates, such organisms often use similar…
Recent research on mobile robots has focused on increasing their adaptability to unpredictable and unstructured environments using soft materials and structures. However, the determination of key design parameters and control over these…
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…
Legged locomotion is commonly studied and expressed as a discrete set of gait patterns, like walk, trot, gallop, which are usually treated as given and pre-programmed in legged robots for efficient locomotion at different speeds. However,…
Bacterial swarming is a rapid mass-migration, in which thousands of cells spread collectively to colonize a surface. Physically, swarming is a natural example of active particles that use energy to generate motion. Accordingly,…
Stick-slip motion, a common phenomenon observed during crawling of cells, is found to be strongly sensitive to the substrate stiffness. Stick-slip behaviours have previously been investigated typically using purely elastic substrates. For a…