Related papers: Collective behavior of "flexicles"
Natural organisms utilize distributed actuation through their musculoskeletal systems to adapt their gait for traversing diverse terrains or to morph their bodies for varied tasks. A longstanding challenge in robotics is to emulate this…
We review recent progress in the theoretical description of anisotropic hard colloidal particles. The shapes considered range from rods and dumbbells to rounded cubes, polyhedra and to biaxial particles with arbitrary shape. Our focus is on…
In this study, we investigate the phenomenon of collective motion in binary mixtures of self-propelled particles. We consider two particle species, each of which consisting of pointlike objects that propel with a velocity of constant…
We study numerically the phases and dynamics of a dense collection of self-propelled particles with soft repulsive interactions in two dimensions. The model is motivated by recent in vitro experiments on confluent monolayers of migratory…
In order to keep their cohesiveness during locomotion gregarious animals must make collective decisions. Many species boast complex societies with multiple levels of communities. A common case is when two dominant levels exist, one…
Many-body interactions in systems of active matter can cause particles to move collectively and self-organize into dynamic structures with long-range order. In cells, the self-assembly of cytoskeletal filaments is critical for cellular…
Biological swarms, such as ant colonies, achieve collective goals through decentralized and stochastic individual behaviors. Similarly, physical systems composed of gases, liquids, and solids exhibit random particle motion governed by…
Active matter physics and swarm robotics have provided powerful tools for the study and control of ensembles driven by internal sources. At the macroscale, controlling swarms typically utilizes significant memory, processing power, and…
A large variety of microorganisms produce molecules to communicate via complex signaling mechanisms such as quorum sensing and chemotaxis. The biological diversity is enormous, but synthetic inanimate colloidal microswimmers mimic…
Designing robotic systems that can change their physical form factor as well as their compliance to adapt to environmental constraints remains a major conceptual and technical challenge. To address this, we introduce the Granulobot, a…
Contact inhibition plays a crucial role in the motility of cells, the process of wound healing, and the formation of tumors. By mimicking the mechanical motion of calls crawling on a substrate using a pseudopod, we constructed a minimal…
Shape changes resulting from segmental flexibility are ubiquitous in molecular and biological systems, and are expected to affect both the diffusive motion and (biological) function of dispersed objects. The recent development of colloidal…
We study the behaviour of interacting self-propelled particles, whose self-propulsion speed decreases with their local density. By combining direct simulations of the microscopic model with an analysis of the hydrodynamic equations obtained…
Bacteria exist in a free-swimming state or in a sessile biofilm state. The transition from free-swimming to sessile mode is characterized by changes in gene expression which alter, among others,the mechanics of flagellar motility. In this…
Advances in synthetic biology allow us to engineer bacterial collectives with pre-specified characteristics. However, the behavior of these collectives is difficult to understand, as cellular growth and division as well as extra-cellular…
Confluent cell monolayers and epithelia tissues show remarkable patterns and correlations in structural arrangements and actively-driven collective flows. We simulate these properties using multiphase field models. The models are based on…
Active agents - like phoretic particles, bacteria, sperm, and cytoskeletal filaments in motility assays - show a large variety of motility-induced collective behaviors, such as aggregation, clustering and phase separation. The behavior of…
We use a computational phase-field model together with analytical analysis to study how inter-cellular active forces can mediate individual cell morphology and collective motion in a confluent cell monolayer. Contractile inter-cellular…
We study the role of hydrodynamic interactions in the collective behaviour of collections of microscopic active particles suspended in a fluid. We introduce a novel calculational framework that allows us to separate the different…
The behavior of particles driven through a narrow constriction is investigated in experiment and simulation. The system of particles adapts to the confining potentials and the interaction energies by a self-consistent arrangement of the…