Related papers: Shape-programmable Adaptive Multi-material Microro…

In this paper, we present an underactuated biomimetic underwater robot that is suitable for ecosystem monitoring in both marine and freshwater environments. We present an updated mechanical design for a fish-like robot and propose minimal…

The design of artificial microswimmers is often inspired by the strategies of natural microorganisms. Many of these creatures exploit the fact that elasticity breaks the time-reversal symmetry of motion at low Reynolds numbers, but this…

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…

Exploring bodies of water on their surface allows robots to efficiently communicate and harvest energy from the sun. On the water surface, however, robots often face highly unstructured environments, cluttered with plant matter, animals,…

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…

Oscillations of flagella and cilia play an important role in biology, which motivates the idea of functional mimicry as part of bio-inspired applications. Nevertheless, it still remains challenging to drive their artificial counterparts to…

Through the implementation of reconfigurability to achieve flexibility and adaptation to tasks by morphology changes rather than by increasing the number of joints, malleable robots present advantages over traditional serial robot arms in…

A method for adaptive model order reduction for nonsmooth discrete element simulation is developed and analysed in numerical experiments. Regions of the granular media that collectively move as rigid bodies are substituted with rigid bodies…

In narrow, unstructured underwater environments such as environmental monitoring and minimally invasive medical procedures, micro soft robots exhibit unique advantages due to their flexible movement capabilities and small size. At the same…

The transport of bio-particles in viscous flows exhibits a rich variety of dynamical behaviour, such as morphological transitions, complex orientation dynamics or deformations. Characterising such complex behaviour under well controlled…

Eukaryotic swimming cells such as spermatozoa, algae or protozoa use flagella or cilia to move in viscous fluids. The motion of their flexible appendages in the surrounding fluid induces propulsive forces that balance with the viscous drag…

The survival of many microorganisms, like \textit{Leptospira} or \textit{Spiroplasma} bacteria, can depend on their ability to navigate towards regions of favorable viscosity. While this ability, called viscotaxis, has been observed in…

Motivated by recent advances in vesicle engineering, we consider theoretically the locomotion of shape-changing bilayer vesicles at low Reynolds number. By modulating their volume and membrane composition, the vesicles can be made to change…

Anisotropic viscous drag is usually believed to be a requirement for the low Reynolds number locomotion of slender bodies such as flagella and cilia. Here we show that locomotion under isotropic drag is possible for extensible slender…

Recent advancements in soft actuators have enabled soft continuum swimming robots to achieve higher efficiency and more closely mimic the behaviors of real marine animals. However, optimizing the design and control of these soft continuum…

Bacteria exist in a free-swimming state or in a sessile biofilm state. The transition from free-swimming to sessile mode is characterized by changes in gene expression which alter, among others,the mechanics of flagellar motility. In this…

Micro-organisms usually can swim in their liquid environment by flagellar or ciliary beating. In this numerical work, we analyze the influence of flagellar beating on the orbits of a swimming cell in a shear flow. We also calculate the…

We employ three numerical methods to explore the motion of low Reynolds number swimmers, modeling the hydrodynamic interactions by means of the Oseen tensor approximation, lattice Boltzmann simulations and multiparticle collision dynamics.…

Nature has always inspired scientists and engineers to understand the underlying mechanism leading to optimal design in bio-inspired dynamics. This study presents a computational framework for optimizing undulatory swimming profiles using a…

Equipping robotic systems with the capacity to generate $\textit{ex novo}$ hardware during operation extends control of physical adaptability. Unlike modular systems that rely on discrete component integration pre- or post-deployment, we…