Related papers: Emergent intelligence of buckling-driven elasto-ac…
The automatic design of embodied agents (e.g. robots) has existed for 31 years and is experiencing a renaissance of interest in the literature. To date however, the field has remained narrowly focused on two kinds of anatomically simple…
Continuous adaptation allows survival in an ever-changing world. Adjustments in the synaptic coupling strength between neurons are essential for this capability, setting us apart from simpler, hard-wired organisms. How these changes can be…
Advances in synthetic biology allow us to engineer bacterial collectives with pre-specified characteristics. However, the behavior of these collectives is difficult to understand, as cellular growth and division as well as extra-cellular…
In this paper, we report the results from the analysis of a numerical model used for the design of a magnetic linear actuator with applications to fin-based locomotion. Most of the current robotic fish generate bending motion using rotary…
Robots often interact with the world via attached parts such as wheels, joints, or appendages. In many systems, these interactions, and the manner in which they lead to locomotion, can be understood using the machinery of geometric…
Emergence and emergent behaviors are often defined as cases where changes in local interactions between agents at a lower level effectively changes what occurs in the higher level of the system (i.e., the whole swarm) and its properties.…
The field of synthetic active matter has, thus far, been led by efforts to create point-like, isolated (yet interacting) self-propelled objects (\emph{e.g.} colloids, droplets, microrobots) and understanding their collective dynamics. The…
We create a mechanism inspired by bacterial swimmers, featuring two flexible flagella with individual control over rotation speed and direction in viscous fluid environments. Using readily available materials, we design and fabricate…
Active matter systems being in a non-equilibrium state, exhibit complex behaviors such as self-organization and giving rise to emergent phenomena. There are many examples of active particles with biological origins, including bacteria and…
Cells control fluid flows with a spatial and temporal precision that far exceeds the capabilities of current microfluidic technologies. Cells achieve this superior spatio-temporal control by harnessing dynamic networks of cytoskeleton and…
Alignment interactions in active matter are typically modeled as relaxational dynamics toward local consensus. In unbounded systems, this makes alignment effectively decoupled from local density and therefore unable to sustain self-confined…
Cooperative task execution, a hallmark of eusociality, is enabled by local interactions between the agents and the environment through a dynamically evolving communication signal. Inspired by the collective behavior of social insects whose…
Multi-flagellated bacteria utilize the hydrodynamic interaction between their filamentary tails, known as flagella, to swim and change their swimming direction in low Reynolds number flow. This interaction, referred to as bundling and…
Buckling plays a critical role in the transport and dynamics of elastic microfilaments in Stokesian fluids. However, previous work has only considered filaments with homogeneous structural properties. Filament backbone stiffness can be…
Physically intelligent micro-robotic systems exploit information embedded in micro-robots, their colloidal cargo, and their milieu to interact, assemble and form functional structures. Nonlinear anisotropic fluids like nematic liquid…
Living neural networks in our brains autonomously self-organize into large, complex architectures during early development to result in an organized and functional organic computational device. A key mechanism that enables the formation of…
The ability of liquid interfaces to shape slender elastic structures provides powerful strategies to control the architecture of mechanical self assemblies. However, elastocapillarity-driven intelligent design remains unexplored in more…
In this study, we propose a predictive model composed of a recurrent neural network including parametric bias and stochastic elements, and an environmentally adaptive robot control method including variance minimization using the model.…
Living systems are made of active materials with microscopic components that work together to perform macroscopic biological tasks. The breakdown of these collective functionalities leads to diseases, which, conversely, could be treated by…
Mesh-like structures, such as mucus gel or cytoskeleton networks, are ubiquitous in biological systems. These intricate structures are composed of cross-linked, semi-flexible bio-filaments, crucial to numerous biological processes. In many…