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Related papers: Optimal Locomotion for Limbless Crawlers

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In nature, a variety of limbless locomotion patterns flourish from the small or basic life form (Escherichia coli, the amoeba, etc.) to the large or intelligent creatures (e.g., slugs, starfishes, earthworms, octopuses, jellyfishes, and…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2016-11-29 Liangliang Zhu , Yunteng Cao , Yilun Liu , Zhe Yang , Xi Chen

Animal cells can sense chemical gradients without moving, and are faced with the challenge of migrating towards a target despite noisy information on the target position. Here we discuss optimal search strategies for a chaser that moves by…

Biological Physics · Physics 2015-03-18 Pawel Romanczuk , Guillaume Salbreux

In nature, many unicellular organisms are able to swim with the help of beating filaments, where local energy input leads to cooperative undulatory beating motion. Here, we investigate by employing reinforcement learning how undulatory…

Biological Physics · Physics 2025-11-04 Fumiya Tokoro , Hideki Takayama , Shinji Deguchi , Andreas Zöttl , Daiki Matsunaga

Activity and renewability are distinctive features of living matter, and constitute a new class of materials that we term renewable active matter. A striking example is the cell cytoskeleton, where myosin filaments bind to the actin…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-05-27 M. Abhishek , Ankit Dhanuka , Deb Sankar Banerjee , Madan Rao

Numerous physical models have been proposed to explain how cell motility emerges from internal activity, mostly focused on how crawling motion arises from internal processes. Here we offer a classification of self-propulsion mechanisms…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2020-03-05 Aurore Loisy , Jens Eggers , Tanniemola B. Liverpool

Elastic confinements are an important component of many biological systems and dictate the transport properties of suspended particles under flow. In this chapter, we review the Brownian motion of a particle moving in the vicinity of a…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2022-10-28 Abdallah Daddi-Moussa-Ider , Stephan Gekle

Faced with strong demand for robots working in underwater pipeline environments, a novel underwater multi-model locomotion robot is designed and studied in this research. By mimicking the earthworm's metameric body, the robot is segmented…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-08-13 Hongbin Fang , Zihan He , Jian Xu

Suspensions of unicellular microswimmers such as flagellated bacteria or motile algae exhibit spontaneous density heterogeneities at large enough concentrations. Based on the relative location of the biological actuation appendages i.e.…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2017-11-27 Fabian Jan Schwarzendahl , Marco G. Mazza

The transport of bio-particles in viscous flows exhibits a rich variety of dynamical behaviour, such as morphological transitions, complex orientation dynamics or deformations. Characterising such complex behaviour under well controlled…

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…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2023-05-31 Jithu Paul , Yizhar Or , Oleg Gendelman

Microswimmers are exposed in nature to crowded environments and their transport properties depend in a subtle way on the interaction with obstacles. Here, we investigate a model for a single ideal circle swimmer exploring a two-dimensional…

Biological Physics · Physics 2020-03-17 Oleksandr Chepizhko , Thomas Franosch

Rare transitions between long-lived metastable states underlie a great variety of physical, chemical and biological processes. Our quantitative understanding of reactive mechanisms has been driven forward by the insights of transition state…

We perform Brownian dynamics simulations of active stiff polymers undergoing run-reverse dynamics, and so mimic bacterial swimming, in porous media. In accord with recent experiments of \emph{Escherichia coli}, the polymer dynamics are…

Miniature locomotion robots with the ability to navigate confined environments show great promise for a wide range of tasks, including search and rescue operations. Soft miniature locomotion robots, as a burgeoning field, have attracted…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-09-21 Quan Xiong , Xuanyi Zhou , Jonathan William Ambrose , Raye Chen-Hua Yeow

Unicellular microscopic organisms living in aqueous environments outnumber all other creatures on Earth. A large proportion of them are able to self-propel in fluids with a vast diversity of swimming gaits and motility patterns. In this…

Biological Physics · Physics 2021-07-14 Marcos F. Velho Rodrigues , Maciej Lisicki , Eric Lauga

Animals achieve robust locomotion by offloading regulation from the brain to physical couplings within the body. In contrast, locomotion in artificial systems often depends on centralized processors. We introduce a rapid and autonomous…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-05-16 Alberto Comoretto , Harmannus A. H. Schomaker , Johannes T. B. Overvelde

Generating robust locomotion for a humanoid robot in the presence of disturbances is difficult because of its high number of degrees of freedom and its unstable nature. In this paper, we used the concept of Divergent Component of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-12-23 Mohammadreza Kasaei , Nuno Lau , Artur Pereira

In addition to enabling movement towards environments with favourable living conditions, swimming by microorganisms has also been linked to enhanced mixing and improved nutrient uptake by their populations. Experimental studies have shown…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2017-11-07 Blaise Delmotte , Eric E Keaveny , Eric Climent , Franck Plouraboué

Nature has always inspired scientists and engineers to understand the underlying mechanism leading to optimal design in bio-inspired dynamics. This study presents a computational framework for optimizing undulatory swimming profiles using a…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2026-04-09 Hamayun Farooq , Imran Akhtar , Muhammad Saif Ullah Khalid , Haris Moazam Sheikh

Despite their vast morphological diversity, many invertebrates have similar larval forms characterized by ciliary bands, innervated arrays of beating cilia that facilitate swimming and feeding. Hydrodynamics suggests that these bands should…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2018-04-25 William Gilpin , Vivek N. Prakash , Manu Prakash