Related papers: Pleobot: a modular robotic solution for metachrona…
Microorganisms and synthetic microswimmers often encounter complex environments consisting of networks of obstacles embedded into viscous fluids. Such settings include biological media, such as mucus with filamentous networks, as well as…
Deep reinforcement learning has recently been applied to a variety of robotics applications, but learning locomotion for robots with unconventional configurations is still limited. Prior work has shown that, despite the simple modeling of…
Effective robot navigation in unseen environments is a challenging task that requires precise control actions at high frequencies. Recent advances have framed it as an image-goal-conditioned control problem, where the robot generates…
Objects moving in fluids experience patterns of stress on their surfaces determined by their motion and the geometry of nearby boundaries. Fish and underwater robots can use these patterns for navigation. This paper extends this…
Run-and-tumble (RT) motion is commonly observed in flagellated microswimmers, arising from synchronous and asynchronous flagellar beating. One such example is a biflagellated alga, called \textit{Chlamydomonas reinhardtii}. Its flagellar…
Shrimp, like many invertebrates swimming at intermediate Reynolds numbers ($Re$), rely on the interplay between morphology and kinematics to generate thrust while producing sufficient lift to overcome their negative buoyancy. Shrimp…
Rheotaxis is a well-known phenomenon among microbial organisms and artificial active colloids, wherein the swimmers respond to an imposed flow. We report the first experimental evidence of upstream rheotaxis by spherical active droplets. It…
Hydrodynamic interactions play a key role in the swimming behavior and power consumption of bio-inspired and bio-mimetic micro-swimmers, Cybernetic or artificial alike. As micro-robotic devices, bio-inspired micro-swimmers require fast and…
Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…
Active flexible filaments form the classical continuum framework for modelling the locomotion of spermatozoa and algae driven by the periodic oscillation of flagella. This framework also applies to the locomotion of various artificial…
Research on the co-optimization of soft robotic design and control requires rapid means for real-world validation. Existing creation pipelines do not allow for the swift prototyping of soft robots to quickly test various design…
In this paper we study the locomotion of a shape-changing body swimming in a two-dimensional perfect fluid of infinite extent. The shape-changes are prescribed as functions of time satisfying constraints ensuring that they result from the…
Micro-organisms propel themselves in viscous environments by the periodic, nonreciprocal beating of slender appendages known as flagella. Active materials have been widely exploited to mimic this form of locomotion. However, the realization…
Underwater robotic manipulation faces significant challenges due to complex fluid dynamics and unstructured environments, causing most manipulation systems to rely heavily on human teleoperation. In this paper, we introduce AquaBot, a fully…
Humanoid robots are machines built with an anthropomorphic shape. Despite decades of research into the subject, it is still challenging to tackle the robot locomotion problem from an algorithmic point of view. For example, these machines…
Prior flow matching methods in robotics have primarily learned velocity fields to morph one distribution of trajectories into another. In this work, we extend flow matching to capture second-order trajectory dynamics, incorporating…
Micro-swimmer locomotion in heterogeneous media is increasingly relevant in biological physics due to the prevalence of microorganisms in complex environments. A model for such porous media is the Brinkman fluid which accounts for a sparse…
The locomotion of microorganisms and spermatozoa in complex viscoelastic fluids is of critical importance in many biological processes such as fertilization, infection, and biofilm formation. Depending on their propulsion mechanisms,…
Many biological fluids have polymeric microstructures and display non-Newtonian rheology. We take advantage of such nonlinear fluid behavior and combine it with geometrical symmetry-breaking to design a novel small-scale propeller able to…
Inspired by the snap-through action of a steel hairclip, we propose a design method for in-plane prestressed mechanisms that exhibit biomimetic morphing and high locomotion performance. Compliant bistable flapping mechanisms are fabricated…