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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…

A common feature of biological self-organization is how active agents communicate with each other or their environment via chemical signaling. Such communications, mediated by self-generated chemical gradients, have consequences for both…

There is increasing evidence that mammalian cells not only crawl on substrates but can also swim in fluids. To elucidate the mechanisms of the onset of motility of cells in suspension, a model which couples actin and myosin kinetics to…

In contrast with the diversity of materials found in nature, most robots are designed with some combination of aluminum, stainless steel, and 3D-printed filament. Additionally, robotic systems are typically assumed to follow basic…

The ability of many living systems to actively self-propel underlies critical biomedical, environmental, and industrial processes. While such active transport is well-studied in uniform settings, environmental complexities such as geometric…

With exquisite precision and reproducibility, cells orchestrate the cooperative action of thousands of nanometer-sized molecular motors to carry out mechanical tasks at much larger length scales, such as cell motility, division and…

Cooperative transport is a striking phenomenon where multiple agents join forces to transit a payload too heavy for the individual. While social animals such as ants are routinely observed to coordinate transport at scale, reproducing the…

The biomechanics of the human body gives subjects a high degree of freedom in how they can execute movement. Nevertheless, subjects exhibit regularity in their movement patterns. One way to account for this regularity is to suppose that…

We investigate energy-optimal control of robots with ultracapacitor based regenerative drive systems. Based on a previously introduced framework, a fairly generic model is considered for the robot and the drive system. An optimal control…

Biomolecular machines transduce between different forms of energy. These machines make directed progress and increase their speed by consuming free energy, typically in the form of nonequilibrium chemical concentrations. Machine dynamics…

A theory is presented for wave-driven propulsion of floating bodies driven into oscillation at the fluid interface. By coupling the equations of motion of the body to a quasi-potential flow model of the fluid, we derive expressions for the…

This article describes a biomimetic control architecture affording an animat both action selection and navigation functionalities. It satisfies the survival constraint of an artificial metabolism and supports several complementary…

In legged locomotion, the relationship between different gait behaviors and energy consumption must consider the full-body dynamics and the robot control as a whole, which cannot be captured by simple models. This work studies the robot…

Run-and-tumble is a basic model of persistent motion and a motility strategy widespread in micro-organisms and individual cells. In many natural settings, movement occurs in the presence of confinement. While accumulation at the surface has…

Active particles with their characteristic feature of self-propulsion are regarded as the simplest models for motility in living systems. The accumulation of active particles in low activity regions has led to the general belief that…

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…

Many robots are not equipped with a manipulator and many objects are not suitable for prehensile manipulation (such as large boxes and cylinders). In these cases, pushing is a simple yet effective non-prehensile skill for robots to interact…

The levels of agility and flight or swimming performance demonstrated by insects, birds, fish, and even some aquatic invertebrates, are often vastly superior to what even the most advanced human-engineered vehicles operating in the same…

We consider active Brownian particles that intermittently switch between active and inactive states. Such behavior is ubiquitous at all scales, from bacteria to animals and in artificial active systems. We derive exact expressions for key…

Navigating mobile robots through environments shared with humans is challenging. From the perspective of the robot, humans are dynamic obstacles that must be avoided. These obstacles make the collision-free space nonconvex, which leads to…