Related papers: Optimal Locomotion for Limbless Crawlers
As society paves its way towards device miniaturization and precision medicine, micro-scale actuation and guided transport become increasingly prominent research fields with high impact in both technological and clinical contexts. In order…
Walking is a common bipedal and quadrupedal gait and is often associated with terrestrial and aquatic organisms. Inspired by recent evidence of the neural underpinnings of primitive aquatic walking in the little skate Leucoraja erinacea, we…
In this article, we study a branching random walk in an environment which depends on the time. This time-inhomogeneous environment consists of a sequence of macroscopic time intervals, in each of which the law of reproduction remains…
In this paper we focus on a two-link swimmer called scallop which moves changing dynamics between two fluids regimes. We address and solve explicitly two optimal control problems, the minimum time one and the minimum quadratic cost needed…
We analyze the nonequilibrium dynamics of single inextensible semiflexible biopolymers as stretching forces are applied at the ends. Based on different (contradicting) heuristic arguments, various scaling laws have been proposed for the…
Robots are becoming increasingly essential for traversing complex environments such as disaster areas, extraterrestrial terrains, and marine environments. Yet, their potential is often limited by mobility and adaptability constraints. In…
This paper presents a soft earthworm robot that is capable of both efficient locomotion and obstacle avoidance. The robot is designed to replicate the unique locomotion mechanisms of earthworms, which enable them to move through narrow and…
Cell movement and intercellular signaling occur simultaneously during the development of tissues, but little is known about how movement affects signaling. Previous theoretical studies have shown that faster moving cells favor…
Mudskippers are unique amphibious fish capable of locomotion in diverse environments, including terrestrial surfaces, aquatic habitats, and highly viscous substrates such as mud. This versatile locomotion is largely enabled by their…
We present the modeling, design, fabrication and feedback control of an earthworm-inspired soft robot capable of crawling on surfaces by actively manipulating the frictional force between its body and the surface. Earthworms are segmented…
Self-organized dynamic patterns in dense active matter are striking manifestations of non-equilibrium physics. A prominent example is the macroscopic elliptical motion observed in quasi-2D bacterial suspensions, which has lacked a physical…
How do we capture the breadth of behavior in animal movement, from rapid body twitches to aging? Using high-resolution videos of the nematode worm $C. elegans$, we show that a single dynamics connects posture-scale fluctuations with…
Restrictions to molecular motion by barriers (membranes) are ubiquitous in biological tissues, porous media and composite materials. A major challenge is to characterize the microstructure of a material or an organism nondestructively using…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
Cells swimming in viscous fluids create flow fields which influence the transport of relevant nutrients, and therefore their feeding rate. We propose a modeling approach to the problem of optimal feeding at zero Reynolds number. We consider…
Organisms that locomote by propagating waves of body bending can maintain performance across heterogeneous environments by modifying their gait frequency $\omega$ or wavenumber $k$. We identify a unifying relationship between these…
Many biological microswimmers locomote by periodically beating the densely-packed cilia on their cell surface in a wave-like fashion. While the swimming mechanisms of ciliated microswimmers have been extensively studied both from the…
Undulatory locomotion is common to nematodes as well as to limbless vertebrates, but its control is not understood in spite of the identification of hundred of genes involved in Caenorhabditis elegans locomotion. To reveal the mechanisms of…
While the animals' Fin-to-Limb evolution has been well-researched in biology, such morphological transformation remains under-adopted in the modern design of advanced robotic limbs. This paper investigates a novel class of overconstrained…
This paper applies the theory of rate-independent systems to model the locomotion of bio-mimetic soft crawlers. We prove the well-posedness of the approach and illustrate how the various strategies adopted by crawlers to achieve locomotion,…