Related papers: Accelerating Aquatic Soft Robots with Elastic Inst…
A long-standing engineering problem, the control of soft robots is difficult because of their highly non-linear, heterogeneous, anisotropic, and distributed nature. Here, bridging engineering and biology, a neural reservoir is employed for…
The collective swimming of soft robots in an infinite viscous fluid is an emergent phenomenon due to the non-reciprocal hydrodynamic interactions between individual swimmers. These physical interactions give rise to unique spatiotemporal…
Many marine creatures, gastropods, and earthworms generate continuous traveling waves in their bodies for locomotion within marine environments, complex surfaces, and inside narrow gaps. In this work, we study theoretically and…
It is shown that the system efficiency of a self-propelled flexible body is ill-defined unless one considers the concept of quasi-propulsive efficiency, defined as the ratio of the power needed to tow a body in rigid-straight condition over…
Microscopic robots could perform tasks with high spatial precision, such as acting on precisely-targeted cells in biological tissues. Some tasks may benefit from robots that change shape, such as elongating to improve chemical gradient…
We discuss a two-dimensional model for the dynamics of axonemal deformations driven by internally generated forces of molecular motors. Our model consists of an elastic filament pair connected by active elements. We derive the dynamic…
High-speed and high-acceleration movements are inherently hard to control. Applying learning to the control of such motions on anthropomorphic robot arms can improve the accuracy of the control but might damage the system. The inherent…
Locomotion is typically studied either in continuous media where bodies and legs experience forces generated by the flowing medium, or on solid substrates dominated by friction. In the former, centralized coordination is believed to…
We study a linear inviscid model of a passively flexible swimmer with distributed flexibility, calculating its propulsive performance and optimal distributions of flexibility. The frequencies of actuation and mean stiffness ratios we…
It has been a great challenge to develop robots that are able to perform complex movement patterns with high speed and, simultaneously, high accuracy. Copepods are animals found in freshwater and saltwater habitats that can have extremely…
A new approach for the supercavitating hull optimization was proposed, which combines the CFD simulation and analytical methods. The high-speed penetration into water at the velocity 1 km/s was considered with the fixed body mass and…
The Hamiltonian coupled-mode theory (HCMT), recently derived by Athanassoulis and Papoutsellis [1], provides an efficient new approach for solving fully nonlinear water-wave problems over arbitrary bathymetry. In HCMT, heavy use is made of…
Real-time motion prediction of a vessel or a floating platform can help to improve the performance of motion compensation systems. It can also provide useful early-warning information for offshore operations that are critical with regard to…
Semi-submersible vehicles keep most of their hulls underwater while maintaining a small platform above the water surface. These craft can find use for both naval operations and civil transportation due to special properties, including the…
Two-dimensional infrared spectroscopy experiments have presented new results regarding the dynamics of the hydrated excess proton (aka <q>hydronium</q> cation solvated in water). It has been suggested by these experiments that the hydrated…
The efficient optimization of actuated soft structures, particularly under complex nonlinear forces, remains a critical challenge in advancing robotics. Simulations of nonlinear structures, such as soft-bodied robots modeled using the…
We use the Deep Q-Network with reinforcement learning to investigate the emergence of odd elasticity in an elastic microswimmer model. For an elastic microswimmer, it is challenging to obtain the optimized dynamics due to the intricate…
This work presents the MarineGym, a high-performance reinforcement learning (RL) platform specifically designed for underwater robotics. It aims to address the limitations of existing underwater simulation environments in terms of RL…
Attempts to use Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) flow for propulsion have been made since the last century [1]. Limited success has been registered particularly due to the inhomogeneous generation of the thrust, and also the very light weight and…
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…