Related papers: Optimal Locomotion for Limbless Crawlers
Some euglenids, a family of aquatic unicellular organisms, can develop highly concerted, large-amplitude peristaltic body deformations. This remarkable behaviour has been known for centuries. Yet, its function remains controversial, and is…
Amoeboid motion is a dynamic mode of cell motility essential for processes such as the immune response and wound healing. This review examines recent developments in the mathematical and computational modeling of amoeboid crawling, focusing…
Many microorganisms swim by performing larger non-reciprocal shape deformations that are initiated locally by molecular motors. However, it remains unclear how decentralized shape control determines the movement of the entire organism.…
It is often overlooked by roboticists when designing locomotion controllers for their legged machines, that energy consumption plays an important role in selecting the best gaits for locomotion at high speeds or over long distances. The…
The development of versatile robots capable of traversing challenging and irregular environments is of increasing interest in the field of robotics, and metameric robots have been identified as a promising solution due to their slender,…
Biological locomotion in nature is often achieved by the interaction between a flexible body and its surrounding medium. The interaction of a flexible body with granular media is less understood compared with viscous fluids partially due to…
Sprawling locomotion in vertebrates, particularly salamanders, demonstrates how body undulation and spinal mobility enhance stability, maneuverability, and adaptability across complex terrains. While prior work has separately explored…
Active navigation in disordered media depends on a biased random walk interacting with environmental constraints. Using E. coli chemotactic navigation in agar gels as a model system, we reveal a fundamental trade-off between diffusive…
We study a model of contraction-based cell motility inside a microchannel to investigate the regulation of cell polarization and motion by the mechanical resistance of the environment. A positive feedback between the asymmetry of the…
The question of how "smart" active agents, like insects, microorganisms, or future colloidal robots need to steer to optimally reach or discover a target, such as an odor source, food, or a cancer cell in a complex environment has recently…
Fish-inspired aquatic robots are gaining increasing attention in marine robot communities due to their high swimming speeds and efficient propulsion enabled by flexible bodies that generate undulatory motions. To support the design…
Legged robots offer several advantages when navigating unstructured environments, but they often fall short of the efficiency achieved by wheeled robots. One promising strategy to improve their energy economy is to leverage their natural…
Animal locomotion is often subject to constraints arising from anatomical/physiological asymmetries. We use the nematode C.~elegans as a minimal model system to ask whether such constraints might shape locomotion patterns optimized during…
A major field of industrial robot applications deals with repetitive tasks that alternate between operating points. For these so-called pick-and-place operations, parallel kinematic manipulators (PKM) are frequently employed. These tasks…
Biological microswimmers such as bacteria and sperm cells often encounter complex biological fluid environments. Here we use the well-known squirmer microswimmer model to show the importance of the local fluid microstructure and…
This work analyzes fractional continuous-time random walks on two-layer multiplexes. A node-centric dynamics is used, in which it is assumed a Poisson distribution of a walker to become active, while a jump to one of its neighbors depends…
Living systems such as neuronal networks and animal groups process information about their environment via the dynamics of interacting units. These can transition between distinct macroscopic behaviors. Near such a transition (or critical…
Navigation in complex and noisy environments is a key issue in diverse fields from biology to engineering. Despite extensive progress in numerical optimization methods for computing navigation policies, insights into how disorder reshapes…
Scaling mobility patterns have been widely observed for animals. In this paper, we propose a deterministic walk model to understand the scaling mobility patterns, where walkers take the least-action walks on a lattice landscape and prey.…
Limitations in actuation, sensing, and computation have forced small legged robots to rely on carefully tuned, mechanically mediated leg trajectories for effective locomotion. Recent advances in manufacturing, however, have enabled the…