Related papers: Shape-programmable Adaptive Multi-material Microro…
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…
Underwater robots are widely deployed for ocean exploration and manipulation. Underactuated mechanisms are particularly advantageous in aquatic environments, as reducing actuator count lowers the risk of motor leakage while introducing…
Unlike macroscopic swimmers, microswimmers operate in a low-Reynolds-number regime dominated by viscous forces. This paper investigates the controllability of a magnetic microswimmer composed of a spherical magnetic head and an elastic,…
Inspired by the necessity of morphological adaptation in animals, a growing body of work has attempted to expand robot training to encompass physical aspects of a robot's design. However, reinforcement learning methods capable of optimizing…
Magnetic microrobots that swim through liquid media are of interest for minimally invasive medical procedures, bioengineering, and manufacturing. Many of the envisaged applications, such as micromanipulation and targeted cargo delivery,…
Microorganisms can create engineered materials with exquisite structures and living functionalities. Although synthetic biology tools to genetically manipulate microorganisms continue to expand, the bottom-up rational design of engineered…
Faced with strong demand for robots working in underwater pipeline environments, a novel underwater multi-model locomotion robot is designed and studied in this research. By mimicking the earthworm's metameric body, the robot is segmented…
Many biological microorganisms and artificial microswimmers react to external cues of environmental gradients by changing their swimming directions. We study here the behavior of eukarytic flagellated microswimmers in linear viscosity…
Evolutionary robotics aims to automatically design autonomous adaptive morphological robots that can evolve to accomplish a specific task while adapting to environmental changes. Soft robotics have demonstrated the feasibility of…
Microscopic robots could perform tasks with high spatial precision, such as acting in biological tissues on the scale of individual cells, provided they can reach precise locations. This paper evaluates the feasibility of in vivo locomotion…
We illustrate shape mode analysis as a simple, yet powerful technique to concisely describe complex biological shapes and their dynamics. We characterize undulatory bending waves of beating flagella and reconstruct a limit cycle of…
Evolutionary robot systems are usually affected by the properties of the environment indirectly through selection. In this paper, we present and investigate a system where the environment also has a direct effect: through regulation. We…
Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…
Unicellular microscopic organisms living in aqueous environments outnumber all other creatures on Earth. A large proportion of them are able to self-propel in fluids with a vast diversity of swimming gaits and motility patterns. In this…
This paper concerns applications of genetic algorithms and genetic programming to tasks for which it is difficult to find a representation that does not map to a highly complex and discontinuous fitness landscape. In such cases the standard…
Micro-scale swimming robots have been envisaged for many medical applications such as targeted drug delivery, where the microrobot will be expected to navigate in a fluid through channels carrying a payload. Alternatively, in many cases,…
Biomedical applications such as targeted drug delivery, microsurgery, and sensing rely on reaching precise areas within the body in a minimally invasive way. Artificial bacterial flagella (ABFs) have emerged as potential tools for this task…
Fish have endured millions of years of evolution, and their distinct rigid-flexible body structures offer inspiration for overcoming challenges in underwater robotics, such as limited mobility, high energy consumption, and adaptability.…
Undulatory locomotion is a means of self-propulsion that relies on the generation and propagation of waves along a body. As a mode of locomotion it is primitive and relatively simple, yet can be remarkably robust. No wonder then, that it is…
In a recent letter (Friedrich et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 109:138102, 2012), a minimal model swimmer was proposed that propels itself at low Reynolds numbers by a revolving motion of a pair of spheres. The motion of the two spheres can…