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Cells control fluid flows with a spatial and temporal precision that far exceeds the capabilities of current microfluidic technologies. Cells achieve this superior spatio-temporal control by harnessing dynamic networks of cytoskeleton and…
We outline a concept of self-assembled soft matter devices based on micro-fluidics, which use surfactant bilayer membranes as their main building blocks, arrested in geometric structures provided by top-down lithography. Membranes form…
Chiral responses in electromagnetic metasurfaces are typically categorized as extrinsic, resulting from asymmetric interactions between the structure and incident waves, and intrinsic, arising from three-dimensional symmetry breaking of the…
Mode division multiplexing (MDM) in optical fibers enables multichannel capabilities for various applications, including data transmission, quantum networks, imaging, and sensing. However, MDM optical fiber systems, usually necessities…
Metasurfaces offered great opportunities to control electromagnetic (EM) waves, but currently available meta-devices typically work either in pure reflection or pure transmission mode, leaving half of EM space completely unexplored. Here,…
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…
Micro- and molecular-robotic systems act as large-scale swarms. Capabilities of sensing, communication and information processing are very limited on these scales. This short position paper describes a swarm-based minimalistic approach,…
Driven by the growing demand for large-scale artificial intelligence applications, disaggregated compute nodes and high-radix switches in next-generation computing clusters are set to surpass the capacity of current optical interconnect…
Miniature robots provide unprecedented access to confined environments and show promising potential for novel applications such as search-and-rescue and high-value asset inspection. The capability of body deformation further enhances the…
Testing aerial robots in tasks such as pickup-and-delivery and surveillance significantly benefits from high energy efficiency and scalability of the deployed robotic system. This paper presents MochiSwarm, an open-source testbed of…
We introduce shape-changing swarm robots. A swarm of self-transformable robots can both individually and collectively change their configuration to display information, actuate objects, act as tangible controllers, visualize data, and…
An electro-optomechanical device capable of microwave-to-optics conversion has recently been demonstrated, with the vision of enabling optical networks of superconducting qubits. Here we present an improved converter design that uses a…
Colloidal inclusions in lab-on-a-chip devices can be used to perform analytic operations in a non-invasive fashion. We demonstrate here a novel approach to realize fast and reversible micro-sieving operations by manipulating and…
Minimally invasive medical procedures, such as endovascular catheterization, have drastically reduced procedure time and associated complications. However, many regions inside the body, such as in the brain vasculature, still remain…
Self-propulsion and navigation due to the sensing of environmental conditions - such as durotaxis and chemotaxis - are remarkable properties of biological cells that cannot be reproduced by single-component self-propelled particles. We…
In most macro-scale robotics systems , propulsion and controls are enabled through a physical tether or complex on-board electronics and batteries. A tether simplifies the design process but limits the range of motion of the robot, while…
Active metasurfaces enable dynamic control of light for applications in beam steering, pixelated holography, and adaptive optics, but demonstrations of two-dimensional (2D) electrically addressable arrays have so far been limited. Here we…
Soft particles display highly versatile properties with respect to hard colloids, even more so at fluid-fluid interfaces. In particular, microgels, consisting of a cross-linked polymer network, are able to deform and flatten upon adsorption…
Much of the Earth and many surfaces of extraterrestrial bodies are composed of in-cohesive particle matter. Locomoting on granular terrain is challenging for common robotic devices, either wheeled or legged. In this work, we discover a…
In the intact brain, neural activity can be recorded using sensing electrodes and manipulated using light stimulation. Silicon probes with integrated electrodes and micro-LEDs enable the detection and control of neural activity using a…