Related papers: The Hidden Wheel-Within
Concept of curvature of liquid surrounding a spherical surface seems obvious in daily life, but based on earthly conditions everywhere. However, our understanding about the concept seems more transparent when we keep the system out of the…
We focus on human-robot collaborative transport, in which a robot and a user collaboratively move an object to a goal pose. In the absence of explicit communication, this problem is challenging because it demands tight implicit coordination…
We present a simple, two dimensional example of a "cat" -- a body with zero angular momentum that can rotate itself with no external forces. This model is used to explain why this problem is known to be a gauge theory and to illustrate the…
Relative motion between soft wet solids arises in a number of applications in natural and artificial settings, and invariably couples elastic deformation and fluid flow. We explore this in a minimal setting by considering a fluid-immersed…
Swarming is a conspicuous behavioural trait observed in bird flocks, fish shoals, insect swarms and mammal herds. It is thought to improve collective awareness and offer protection from predators. Many current models involve the hypothesis…
A central biological question is how natural organisms are so evolvable (capable of quickly adapting to new environments). A key driver of evolvability is the widespread modularity of biological networks--their organization as functional,…
In quantum mechanics, it is often thought that the spin of an object points in a fixed direction at any point in time. For example, after selecting the z-direction as the axis of quantization, a spin-1/2 object (such as an electron) may…
While textiles have existed throughout much of human history as complex mechanical metamaterials, textile science has largely been overlooked by the physics community until recently. In this review, we consider the symmetry, topology, and…
Active systems of self-propelled agents, e.g., birds, fish, and bacteria, can organize their collective motion into myriad autonomous behaviors. Ubiquitous in nature and across length scales, such phenomena are also amenable to artificial…
Principles of self-organization play an increasingly central role in models of human activity. Notably, individual human displacements exhibit strongly recurrent patterns that are characterized by scaling laws and can be mechanistically…
Biological organisms often have elongated, flexible structures with some degree of chirality in their bodies or movements. In nature, these organisms frequently take advantage of self-encapsulation mechanisms that create folded…
Cyborg insects refer to hybrid robots that integrate living insects with miniature electronic controllers to enable robotic-like programmable control. These creatures exhibit advantages over conventional robots in adaption to complex…
Many marine creatures, gastropods, and earthworms generate continuous traveling waves in their bodies for locomotion within marine environments, complex surfaces, and inside narrow gaps. In this work, we study theoretically and…
Soft robots, in contrast to their rigid counter parts, have infinite degrees of freedom that are coupled with their interaction with the environment. We consider the locomotion of an untethered robot, in the granular medium, comprised of…
Most autonomous navigation systems assume wheeled robots are rigid bodies and their 2D planar workspaces can be divided into free spaces and obstacles. However, recent wheeled mobility research, showing that wheeled platforms have the…
Large animal groups -- bird flocks, fish schools, insect swarms -- are often assumed to form by gradual aggregation of sparsely distributed individuals. Using a mathematically precise framework based on time-varying directed interaction…
Cellular biology exists embedded in a world dominated by random dynamics and chance. Many vital molecules and pieces of cellular machinery diffuse within cells, moving along random trajectories as they collide with the other biomolecular…
Active particle systems of interacting self-propelled particles offer a versatile framework for modeling complex systems. When employed to describe aspects of animal behavior, the complexity of animal movement and decision-making often…
A Swinging Atwood Machine (SAM) is built and some experimental results concerning its dynamic behaviour are presented. Experiments clearly show that pulleys play a role in the motion of the pendulum, since they can rotate and have…
Glasses are ubiquitous amorphous solids that remain one of the big mysteries in condensed matter. Despite the vast body of literature on glasses, a unifying approach to link the structure and dynamics of glasses is still missing. A growing…