Related papers: Steering undulatory micro-swimmers in a fluid flow…

Reinforcement Learning in domains with sparse rewards is a difficult problem, and a large part of the training process is often spent searching the state space in a more or less random fashion for any learning signals. For control problems,…

Artificial microswimmers are a new technology with promising microfluidics and biomedical applications, such as directed cargo transport, microscale assembly, and targeted drug delivery. A fundamental barrier to realising this potential is…

Transfer learning significantly accelerates the reinforcement learning process by exploiting relevant knowledge from previous experiences. The problem of optimally selecting source policies during the learning process is of great importance…

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…

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning when provided with (1) a baseline control policy and (2) a set of constraints that the learner must satisfy. The baseline policy can arise from demonstration data or a teacher agent and may…

Many microorganisms swim through gels and non-Newtonian fluids in their natural environments. In this paper, we focus on microorganisms which use flagella for propulsion. We address how swimming velocities are affected in nonlinearly…

We propose and analyze a simple model for the evolution of an immersed, inextensible filament which incorporates linear viscoelastic effects of the surrounding fluid. The model is a closed-form system of equations along the curve only which…

The propulsion of many eukaryotic cells is generated by flagella, flexible slender filaments that are actively oscillating in space and time. The dynamics of these biological appendages have inspired the design of many types of artificial…

Navigating fluently around pedestrians is a necessary capability for mobile robots deployed in human environments, such as buildings and homes. While research on social navigation has focused mainly on the scalability with the number of…

Imitation learning has emerged as an effective approach for bootstrapping sequential decision-making in robotics, achieving strong performance even in high-dimensional dexterous manipulation tasks. Recent behavior cloning methods further…

With the continuing rapid development of artificial microrobots and active particles, questions of microswimmer guidance and control are becoming ever more relevant and prevalent. In both the applications and theoretical study of such…

To optimize flapping foil performance, the application of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) on controlling foil non-parametric motion is conducted in the present study. Traditional control techniques and simplified motions cannot fully…

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…

Reinforcement learning continuously optimizes decision-making based on real-time feedback reward signals through continuous interaction with the environment, demonstrating strong adaptive and self-learning capabilities. In recent years, it…

Soft growing robots, are a type of robots that are designed to move and adapt to their environment in a similar way to how plants grow and move with potential applications where they could be used to navigate through tight spaces, dangerous…

Micro robotics is quickly emerging to be a promising technological solution to many medical treatments with focus on targeted drug delivery. They are effective when working in swarms whose individual control is mostly infeasible owing to…

The dynamics and deformations of immersed flexible fibers are at the heart of important industrial and biological processes, induce peculiar mechanical and transport properties in the fluids that contain them, and are the basis for novel…

Bio-inspired aquatic propulsion offers high thrust and maneuverability but is prone to destabilizing forces such as lift fluctuations, which are further amplified by six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) fluid coupling. We formulate quadrupedal…

The properties of biological microswimmers are to a large extent determined by fluid-mediated interactions, which govern their propulsion, perception of their surrounding, and the steering of their motion for feeding or in pursuit.…

Artificial gliders are designed to disperse as they settle through a fluid, requiring precise navigation to reach target locations. We show that a compact glider settling in a viscous fluid can navigate by dynamically adjusting its…