Related papers: Adaptive shape control for microswimmer navigation…

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…

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…

We propose a combined analytical-numerical strategy to predict the dynamics and trajectory of a microswimmer next to a curved spherical obstacle. The microswimmer is actuated by a slip velocity on its surface and a uniformly valid solution…

We study two microswimmers consisting of a spherical rigid head and a passive elastic tail. In the first one the tail is clamped to the head, and the system oscillates under the action of an external torque. In the second one, head and tail…

Microswimming cells and robots exhibit diverse behaviours due to both their swimming and their environment. One of the core environmental features impacting inertialess swimming is background flows. While the influence of select flows,…

Micro robotics is quickly emerging to be a promising technological solution to many medical treatments with focus on targeted drug delivery. They are effective when working in swarms whose individual control is mostly infeasible owing to…

In marine plankton, many swimming species can perceive their environment with flow sensors. Can they use this flow information to travel faster in turbulence? To address this question, we consider plankters swimming at constant speed, whose…

Nature has always inspired scientists and engineers to understand the underlying mechanism leading to optimal design in bio-inspired dynamics. This study presents a computational framework for optimizing undulatory swimming profiles using a…

Many autonomous systems face safety challenges, requiring robust closed-loop control to handle physical limitations and safety constraints. Real-world systems, like autonomous ships, encounter nonlinear dynamics and environmental…

Two-dimensional shape-morphing networks are common in biological systems and have garnered attention due to their nontrivial physical properties that emanate from their cellular nature. Here, we present the fabrication and characterization…

Microorganisms have evolved diverse strategies to propel in viscous fluids, navigate complex environments, and exhibit taxis in response to stimuli. This has inspired the development of synthetic microrobots, where machine learning (ML) is…

Inspired by the classical Kepler and Rutherford problem, we investigate an analogous set-up in the context of active microswimmers: the behavior of a deformable microswimmer in a swirl flow. First we identify new steady bound states in the…

Coordinating micro-robotic swarms in physiologically realistic, time-dependent fluid environments remains an unsolved challenge for biomedical and environmental applications. We present a hybrid Computational Fluid Dynamics -…

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…

We introduce a reinforcement learning (RL) based adaptive optimization algorithm for aerodynamic shape optimization focused on dimensionality reduction. The form in which RL is applied here is that of a surrogate-based, actor-critic policy…

Many microorganisms swim by performing larger non-reciprocal shape deformations that are initiated locally by molecular motors. However, it remains unclear how decentralized shape control determines the movement of the entire organism.…

Swimming cells and microorganisms must often move though complex fluids that contain an immersed microstructure such as polymer molecules, or filaments. In many important biological processes, such as mammalian reproduction and bacterial…

Navigation functions provide both path and motion planning, which can be used to ensure obstacle avoidance and convergence in the sphere world. When dealing with complex and realistic scenarios, constructing a transformation to the sphere…

In this work, we develop a computational framework that aims at simultaneously optimizing the shape and the slip velocity of an axisymmetric microswimmer suspended in a viscous fluid. We consider shapes of a given reduced volume that…

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…