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Locomotion is typically studied either in continuous media where bodies and legs experience forces generated by the flowing medium, or on solid substrates dominated by friction. In the former, centralized coordination is believed to…
Bacteria can exploit mechanics to display remarkable plasticity in response to locally changing physical and chemical conditions. Compliant structures play a striking role in their taxis behavior, specifically for navigation inside complex…
Most aquatic vertebrates swim by lateral flapping of their bodies and caudal fins. While much effort has been devoted to understanding the flapping kinematics and its influence on the swimming efficiency, little is known about the stability…
This paper presents the first steps toward a soft dolphin robot using a bio-inspired approach to mimic dolphin flexibility. The current dolphin robot uses a minimalist approach, with only two actuated cable-driven degrees of freedom…
Soft underwater robots typically explore bioinspired designs at the expense of power efficiency when compared to traditional underwater robots, which limits their practical use in real-world applications. We leverage a fluidic closed-loop…
The eukaryotic flagellum beats periodically, driven by the oscillatory dynamics of molecular motors, to propel cells and pump fluids. Small, but perceivable fluctuations in the beat of individual flagella have physiological implications for…
Flagella are hair-like appendages attached to microorganisms that allow the organisms to traverse their fluid environment. The algae Volvox are spherical swimmers with thousands of individual flagella on their surface and their coordination…
Microorganism motility often takes place within complex, viscoelastic fluid environments, e.g., sperm in cervicovaginal mucus and bacteria in biofilms. In such complex fluids, strains and stresses generated by the microorganism are stored…
Using multiparticle collision dynamics simulations, we investigate the swimming dynamics, orientational behavior, and hydrodynamic interactions of a model swimmer designed to mimic the isolated flagellar apparatus ($FA$) of Chlamydomonas…
The design and control of soft robots operating in fluid environments requires a careful understanding of the interplay between large elastic body deformations and hydrodynamic forces. Here we show that this interplay leads to novel…
All-around, real-time navigation and sensing across the water environments by miniature soft robotics are promising, for their merits of small size, high agility and good compliance to the unstructured surroundings. In this paper, we…
The current understanding of motility through body shape deformation of microorganisms and the knowledge of fluid flows at the microscale provides ample examples for mimicry and design of soft microrobots. In this work, a two-dimensional…
Under-actuated compliant robotic systems offer a promising approach to mitigating actuation and control challenges by harnessing pre-designed, embodied dynamic behaviors. This paper presents Flix-Walker, a novel, untethered,…
Exploring bodies of water on their surface allows robots to efficiently communicate and harvest energy from the sun. On the water surface, however, robots often face highly unstructured environments, cluttered with plant matter, animals,…
Viscoelasticity governs the locomotion strategies of deformable microorganisms, rendering it a fundamental mechanical property of microbial motility and an integral component in the design of envisioned microbots. Recent studies have shown…
We use a three-bead-spring model to investigate the dynamics of bi-flagellate micro-swimmers near a surface. While the primary dynamics and scattering are governed by geometric-dependent direct contact, the fluid flows generated by the…
Both natural and artificial small-scale swimmers may often self-propel in environments subject to complex geometrical constraints. While most past theoretical work on low-Reynolds number locomotion addressed idealised geometrical…
We study two microswimmers consisting of a spherical rigid head and a passive elastic tail. In the first one the tail is clamped to the head, and the system oscillates under the action of an external torque. In the second one, head and tail…
The present habilitation thesis in theoretical biological physics addresses two central dynamical processes in cells and organisms: (i) active motility and motility control and (ii) self-organized pattern formation. The unifying theme is…
Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…