Related papers: Improving propulsive efficiency using bio-inspired…
Hovering insects are limited by their physiology and need to rotate their wings at the end of each back and forth motion to keep the wing's leading edge ahead of its trailing edge. The wing rotation at the end of each half-stroke pushes the…
Many swimming and flying animals are observed to cruise in a narrow range of Strouhal numbers, where the Strouhal number ${St = 2fA/U}$ is a dimensionless parameter that relates stroke frequency $f$, amplitude $A$, and forward speed $U$.…
The gaits of undulating animals arise from a complex interaction of their central nervous system, muscle, connective tissue, bone, and environment. As a simplifying assumption, many previous studies have often assumed that sufficient…
Aquatic organisms are known for their ability to generate efficient propulsion with low energy expenditure. While existing research has sought to leverage bio-inspired structures to reduce energy costs in underwater robotics, the crucial…
Traditional locomotion strategies become ineffective at low Reynolds numbers, where viscous forces predominate over inertial forces. To adapt, microorganisms have evolved specialized structures like cilia and flagella for efficient…
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…
Micro-organisms expend energy moving through complex media. While propulsion speed is an important property of locomotion, efficiency is another factor that may determine the swimming gait adopted by a micro-organism in order to locomote in…
Undulatory locomotion, a gait in which thrust is produced in the opposite direction of a traveling wave of body bending, is a common mode of propulsion used by animals in fluids, on land, and even within sand. As such it has been an…
Depending on their mechanism of self-propulsion, active particles can exhibit a time-dependent, often periodic, propulsion velocity. The precise propulsion velocity profile determines their mean square displacement and their effective…
In this communication we address some hydrodynamic aspects of recently revisited drift mechanism of biogenic mixing in the ocean (Katija and Dabiri, Nature vol. 460, pp. 624-626, 2009). The relevance of the locomotion gait at various…
Swimming cells and microorganisms must often move though complex fluids that contain an immersed microstructure such as polymer molecules, or filaments. In many important biological processes, such as mammalian reproduction and bacterial…
Active diffusiophoresis - swimming through interaction with a self-generated, neutral, solute gradient - is a paradigm for autonomous motion at the micrometer scale. We study this propulsion mechanism within a linear response theory.…
While mathematical models, in particular self-propelled particle (SPP) models, capture many of the observed properties of large fish schools, they do not always capture the interactions of smaller shoals. Nor do these models tend to account…
It is often overlooked by roboticists when designing locomotion controllers for their legged machines, that energy consumption plays an important role in selecting the best gaits for locomotion at high speeds or over long distances. The…
Populations of swimming microorganisms produce fluid motions that lead to dramatically enhanced diffusion of tracer particles. Using simulations of suspensions of swimming particles in a periodic domain, we capture this effect and show that…
Three-dimensional experiments are presented on a school of three pitching hydrofoils. Two side-by-side leader foils maintain the same relative positions while the location of a third follower foil is varied. Force and flow measurements…
Limbless crawling is ubiquitous in biology, from cells to organisms. We develop and analyze a model for the dynamics of one-dimensional elastic crawlers, subject to active stress and deformation-dependent friction with the substrate. We…
At low Reynolds numbers the locomotive capability of a body can be dramatically hindered by the absence of inertia. In this work, we show how propulsive performance in this regime can be significantly enhanced by employing spatially varying…
Marine mammal biomechanics research has focused on straight-line swimming at consistent speeds, resulting in a lack of knowledge about how animals select movement strategies to balance cost vs performance during tasks like cornering. In…
To maintain full autonomy, autonomous robotic systems must have the ability to self-repair. Self-repairing via compensatory mechanisms appears in nature: for example, some fish can lose even 76% of their propulsive surface without loss of…