Related papers: Optimal crawling: from mechanical to chemical actu…
Traditional top-down robotic design often lacks the adaptability needed to handle real-world complexities, prompting the need for more flexible approaches. Therefore, this study introduces a novel cellular plasticity model tailored for…
Active navigation in disordered media depends on a biased random walk interacting with environmental constraints. Using E. coli chemotactic navigation in agar gels as a model system, we reveal a fundamental trade-off between diffusive…
In swarm robotics, just as for an animal swarm in Nature, one of the aims is to reach and maintain a desired configuration. One of the possibilities for the team, to reach this aim, is to see what its neighbours are doing. This approach…
Human movements are physical processes combining the classical mechanics of the human body moving in space and the biomechanics of the muscles generating the forces acting on the body under sophisticated sensory-motor control. The…
Trajectory optimization of a robot manipulator consists of both optimization of the robot movement as well as optimization of the robot end-effector path. This paper aims to find optimum movement parameters including movement type, speed,…
Natural fliers like bats exploit the complex fluid-structure interaction between their flexible membrane wings and the air with great ease. Yet, replicating and scaling the balance between the structural and fluid-dynamical parameters of…
Tiny cilia drive the flow of surrounding fluids through asymmetric jumping, which is one of the main ways for biological organisms to control fluid transport at the micro-scale. Due to its huge application prospects in medical and…
Taking inspiration from how the brain coordinates multiple learning systems is an appealing strategy to endow robots with more flexibility. One of the expected advantages would be for robots to autonomously switch to the least costly system…
We perform Brownian dynamics simulations of active stiff polymers undergoing run-reverse dynamics, and so mimic bacterial swimming, in porous media. In accord with recent experiments of \emph{Escherichia coli}, the polymer dynamics are…
Animals can accomplish many incredible behavioral feats across a wide range of operational environments and scales that current robots struggle to match. One explanation for this performance gap is the extraordinary properties of the…
Cell migration often exhibits long-range temporal correlations and anomalous diffusion, even in the absence of external guidance cues such as chemical gradients or topographical constraints. These observations raise a fundamental question:…
Compliance in actuation has been exploited to generate highly dynamic maneuvers such as throwing that take advantage of the potential energy stored in joint springs. However, the energy storage and release could not be well-timed yet. On…
Biomolecular motors use free energy to drive a variety of cellular tasks, including the transport of cargo, such as vesicles and organelles. We find that the widely-used `constant-force' approximation for the effect of cargo on motor…
Optimizing the energy efficiency of driving processes provides valuable insights into the underlying physics and is of crucial importance for numerous applications, from biological processes to the design of machines and robots. Knowledge…
Rectilinear crawling locomotion is a primitive and common mode of locomotion in slender, soft-bodied animals. It requires coordinated contractions that propagate along a body that interacts frictionally with its environment. We propose a…
The ability to navigate in complex, inhomogeneous environments is fundamental to survival at all length scales, giving rise to the rapid development of various subfields in bio-locomotion such as the well established concept of chemotaxis.…
During the past century, biologists and mathematicians investigated two mechanisms underlying bacteria motion: the run phase during which bacteria move in straight lines and the tumble phase in which they change their orientation. When…
We derive from first principles a three-dimensional theory of self-propelled particle swarming in a viscous fluid environment. Our model predicts emergent collective behavior that depends critically on fluid opacity, mechanism of…
Living microorganisms are capable of a tactic response to external stimuli by swimming towards or away from the stimulus source; they do so by adapting their tactic signal transduction pathways to the environment. Their self-motility thus…
Living organisms have developed advanced motion strategies for efficient space exploration, serving as inspiration for the movements of microrobots. These real-life strategies often involve anomalous dynamics displaying random movement…