Related papers: Optimizing Metachronal Paddling with Reinforcement…

Metachronal swimming, the sequential beating of limbs with a small phase lag, is observed in many organisms at various scales, but has been studied mostly in the limits of high or low Reynolds numbers. Motivated by the swimming of brine…

In nature, metachronal coordination is an efficient strategy for fluid pumping and self-propulsion. Yet, mimetic systems for this type of organization are scarce. Recently, metachronal motion was observed in a bead-based magnetocapillary…

We apply a reinforcement learning algorithm to show how smart particles can learn approximately optimal strategies to navigate in complex flows. In this paper we consider microswimmers in a paradigmatic three-dimensional case given by a…

Motile microorganisms develop effective swimming gaits to adapt to complex biological environments. Translating this adaptability to smart microrobots presents significant challenges in motion planning and stroke design. In this work, we…

Synthetic microswimmers show great promise in biomedical applications such as drug delivery and microsurgery. Their locomotion, however, is subject to stringent constraints due to the dominance of viscous over inertial forces at low…

Efficient point-to-point navigation in the presence of a background flow field is important for robotic applications such as ocean surveying. In such applications, robots may only have knowledge of their immediate surroundings or be faced…

Many microswimmers are able to swim through viscous fluids by employing periodic non-reciprocal deformations of their appendages. Here we use a simple microswimmer model inspired by swimming biflagellates which consists of a spherical cell…

Marine microorganisms must cope with complex flow patterns and even turbulence as they navigate the ocean. To survive they must avoid predation and find efficient energy sources. A major difficulty in analysing possible survival strategies…

Smart active particles can acquire some limited knowledge of the fluid environment from simple mechanical cues and exert a control on their preferred steering direction. Their goal is to learn the best way to navigate by exploiting the…

A remarkable variety of organisms use metachronal coordination (i.e., numerous neighboring appendages beating sequentially with a fixed phase lag) to swim or pump fluid. This coordination strategy is used by microorganisms to break symmetry…

Swimming organisms can escape their predators by creating and harnessing unsteady flow fields through their body motions. Stochastic optimization and flow simulations have identified escape patterns that are consistent with those observed…

Marine exploration is essential to understanding ocean processes and organisms. While the use of current unmanned underwater vehicles has enabled many discoveries, there are still plenty of limitations toward exploring complex environments.…

For decades, people have been seeking for fishlike flapping motions that can realize underwater propulsion with low energy cost. Complexity of the nonstationary flow field around the flapping body makes this problem very difficult. In…

This work aims at finding optimal navigation policies for thin, deformable microswimmers that progress in a viscous fluid by propagating a sinusoidal undulation along their slender body. These active filaments are embedded in a prescribed,…

We introduce a generic model of weakly non-linear self-sustained oscillator as a simplified tool to study synchronisation in a fluid at low Reynolds number. By averaging over the fast degrees of freedom, we examine the effect of…

Metachronal locomotion is a widespread swimming mode used by aquatic swarming organisms to achieve performance and maneuverability in the intermediate Reynolds number regime. Our understanding of the mechanisms driving these abilities is…

We use reinforcement learning to find strategies that allow microswimmers in turbulence to avoid regions of large strain. This question is motivated by the hypothesis that swimming microorganisms tend to avoid such regions to minimise the…

Deep reinforcement learning has recently been applied to a variety of robotics applications, but learning locomotion for robots with unconventional configurations is still limited. Prior work has shown that, despite the simple modeling of…

We consider a model of two competing microswimming agents engaged in a pursue-evasion task within a low-Reynolds-number environment. Agents can only perform simple maneuvers and sense hydrodynamic disturbances, which provide ambiguous…

We investigate the hydrodynamic interactions between microorganisms swimming at low Reynolds number. By considering simple model swimmers, and combining analytic and numerical approaches, we investigate the time-averaged flow field around a…