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Situationally-aware artificial agents operating with competence in natural environments face several challenges: spatial awareness, object affordance detection, dynamic changes and unpredictability. A critical challenge is the agent's…
The nonlinear mechanics of a flexible elastic rod constrained at its edges by a pair of sliding sleeves is analyzed. The planar equilibrium configurations of this variable-length elastica are found to have shape defined only by the…
Animal brains exhibit remarkable efficiency in perception and action, while being robust to both external and internal perturbations. The means by which brains accomplish this remains, for now, poorly understood, hindering our understanding…
Differently from passive Brownian particles, active particles, also known as self-propelled Brownian particles or microswimmers and nanoswimmers, are capable of taking up energy from their environment and converting it into directed motion.…
Flow networks are fundamental for understanding systems such as animal and plant vasculature or power distribution grids. These networks can encode, transmit, and transform information embodied in the spatial and temporal distribution of…
Snapping beams enable rapid geometric transitions through nonlinear instability, offering an efficient means of generating motion in soft robotic systems. In this study, a tendon-driven mechanism consisting of spiral-based metabeams was…
Dissipative environments are ubiquitous in nature, from microscopic swimmers in low-Reynolds-number fluids to macroscopic animals in frictional media. In this study, motivated by various behaviours of {\it Caenorhabditis elegans} during…
Active materials are capable of converting free energy into directional motion, giving rise to striking dynamical phenomena. Developing a general understanding of their structure in relation to the underlying non-equilibrium physics would…
Self-organization of heterogeneous particle swarms is rich in its dynamics but hard to design in a traditional top-down manner, especially when many types of kinetically distinct particles are involved. In this chapter, we discuss how we…
Active matter consists of units that generate mechanical work by consuming energy. Examples include living systems, such as assemblies of bacteria and biological tissues, biopolymers driven by molecular motors, and suspensions of synthetic…
The interplay between activity and elasticity often found in active and living systems triggers a plethora of autonomous behaviors ranging from self-assembly and collective motion to actuation. Amongst these, spontaneous self-oscillations…
Nonreciprocal interactions in active matter are known to generate exotic mechanical behaviors such as odd elasticity and odd viscosity. However, these phenomena have largely been studied in isolation, raising a fundamental question: Is…
Stable dynamical systems are a flexible tool to plan robotic motions in real-time. In the robotic literature, dynamical system motions are typically planned without considering possible limitations in the robot's workspace. This work…
Which kind of complex behavior may arise from self-organizing principles? We investigate this question for the case of snake-like robots composed of passively coupled segments, with every segment containing two wheels actuated separately by…
Emergent nonreciprocity in active matter drives the formation of self-organized states that transcend the behaviors of equilibrium systems. Integrating experiments, theory and simulations, we demonstrate that active solids composed of…
Growing soft materials which follow a 3D path in space are critical to applications such as search and rescue and minimally invasive surgery. Here, we present a concept for a single-input growing multi-stable soft material, based on a…
Collective guidance of out-of-equilibrium systems without using external fields is a challenge of paramount importance in active matter, ranging from bacterial colonies to swarms of self-propelled particles. Designing strategies to guide…
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…
Large assemblies of extremely simple robots capable only of basic motion activities (like propelling forward or self-rotating) are often applied to study swarming behavior or implement various phenomena characteristic of active matter…
Aeroelastic phenomena are gaining significant attention from the perspective of energy harvesting (EH) with promising applications in supplying low-power remote sensors. Besides the development of individual EH devices, further issues are…