Related papers: Improving propulsive efficiency using bio-inspired…

Galloping is a common high-speed gait in both animals and quadrupedal robots, yet its energetic characteristics remain insufficiently explored. This study systematically analyzes a large number of possible galloping gaits by categorizing…

Fish schools are ubiquitous in marine life. Although flow interactions are thought to be beneficial for schooling, their exact effects on the speed, energetics, and stability of the group remain elusive. Recent experiments suggest that flow…

Legged locomotion is commonly studied and expressed as a discrete set of gait patterns, like walk, trot, gallop, which are usually treated as given and pre-programmed in legged robots for efficient locomotion at different speeds. However,…

Measuring energy consumption of marine organisms often requires enclosing the animal in a small, sealed chamber to quantify changes in oxygen concentration of the surrounding water. This can limit measurements of free-swimming organisms by…

The motor part of a crawling eukaryotic cell can be represented schematically as an active continuum layer. The main active processes in this layer are protrusion, originating from non-equilibrium polymerization of actin fibers,…

Over the past few decades, biomimetic robotic experiments have significantly advanced our understanding of undulatory swimming. Compared to animal experiments, robotic experiments offer repeatability and controlled parameter variations, but…

This paper is dedicated to the development of a novel adaptive torsion spring mechanism for optimizing energy consumption in legged robots. By adjusting the equilibrium position and stiffness of the spring, the system improves energy…

Fish schooling is often modeled with self-propelled particles subject to phenomenological behavioral rules. Although fish are known to sense and exploit flow features, these models usually neglect hydrodynamics. Here, we propose a novel…

While a rich variety of self-propelled particle models propose to explain the collective motion of fish and other animals, rigorous statistical comparison between models and data remains a challenge. Plausible models should be flexible…

We use small-amplitude inviscid theory to study the swimming performance of a flexible flapping plate with time-varying flexibility. The stiffness of the plate oscillates at twice the frequency of the kinematics in order to maintain a…

Microswimmers, especially in theoretical treatments, are generally taken to be completely inertia-free, since inertial effects on their motion are typically small and assuming their absence simplifies the problem considerably. Yet in nature…

Taking inspiration from the crawling motion of biological cells on a substrate, we consider a physical model of self-propulsion where the spatio-temporal driving can involve both, a mechanical actuation by active force couples, and a…

Coasting has been widely used in the eco-driving guidelines to reduce fuel consumption by profiting from kinetic energy. However, the comprehensive comparison between different coasting strategies and online performance of the eco-coasting…

We study experimentally a a three-dimensional reduced model of a sail shape performing pitching oscillations around a mean incidence angle ($\alpha_{m}$) with respect to an incoming flow in a hydrodynamic channel at a constant velocity…

Swimming and flying animals demonstrate remarkable adaptations to diverse flow conditions in their environments. In this study, we aim to advance the fundamental understanding of the interaction between flexible bodies and heterogeneous…

Elongate animals and robots use undulatory body waves to locomote through diverse environments. Geometric mechanics provides a framework to model and optimize such systems in highly damped environments, connecting a prescribed shape change…

Soaring birds gain energy from stable ascending currents or shear. However, it remains unclear whether energy loss due to drag can be overcome by extracting work from transient turbulent fluctuations. We designed numerical simulations of…

Biological and artificial microswimmers often have to propel through a variety of environments, ranging from heterogeneous suspending media to strong geometrical confinement. Under confinement, local flow fields generated by microswimmers,…

Surface interactions provide a class of mechanisms which can be employed for propulsion of micro- and nanometer sized particles. We investigate the related efficiency of externally and self-propelled swimmers. A general scaling relation is…

We conduct experiments with flexible swimmers to address the impact of fluid viscoelasticity on their locomotion. The swimmers are composed of a magnetic head actuated in rotation by a frequency-controlled magnetic field and a flexible tail…