相关论文: Energy Dissipation by Metamorphic Micro-Robots in …

Microscopic robots could perform tasks with high spatial precision, such as acting in biological tissues on the scale of individual cells, provided they can reach precise locations. This paper evaluates the feasibility of in vivo locomotion…

Microscopic robots in the bloodstream could obtain power from fuel cells using glucose and oxygen. Previous studies of small numbers of such robots operating near each other showed how robots compete with their neighbors for oxygen.…

Fuel cells using oxygen and glucose could power microscopic robots operating in blood vessels. Swarms of such robots can significantly reduce oxygen concentration, depending on the time between successive transits of the lung, hematocrit…

Many organisms, including various species of spiders and caterpillars, change their shape to switch gaits and adapt to different environments. Recent technological advances, ranging from stretchable circuits to highly deformable soft…

Current developments in molecular electronics, motors and chemical sensors could enable constructing large numbers of devices able to sense, compute and act in micron-scale environments. Such microscopic machines, of sizes comparable to…

Objects moving in fluids experience patterns of stress on their surfaces determined by their motion and the geometry of nearby boundaries. Fish and underwater robots can use these patterns for navigation. This paper extends this…

Most evolutionary robotics studies focus on evolving some targeted behavior without taking the energy usage into account. This limits the practical value of such systems because energy efficiency is an important property for real-world…

It is hard to imagine with the progress in robotics that current approaches are lacking somewhere, yet they will not be applicable to the majority of robots in the near future. We are on the verge of two new transitions that will transform…

We design and test an octopus-inspired flexible hull robot that demonstrates outstanding fast-starting performance. The robot is hyper-inflated with water, and then rapidly deflates to expel the fluid so as to power the escape maneuver.…

This paper presents an approach to externally influencing a team of robots by means of time-varying density functions. These density functions represent rough references for where the robots should be located. To this end, a continuous-time…

Shape is an important feature of physical systems although very seldom it is addressed in the framework of a quantitative description approach. In this paper we propose to interpret the shape of things as a physical manifestation of the…

The power available to microscopic robots (nanorobots) that oxidize bloodstream glucose while aggregated in circumferential rings on capillary walls is evaluated with a numerical model using axial symmetry and time-averaged release of…

A robot's mechanical parts routinely wear out from normal functioning and can be lost to injury. For autonomous robots operating in isolated or hostile environments, repair from a human operator is often not possible. Thus, much work has…

Recent research has shown that motile cells can adapt their mode of propulsion depending on the environment in which they find themselves. One mode is swimming by blebbing or other shape changes, and in this paper we analyze a class of…

Biological lifeforms can heal, grow, adapt, and reproduce -- abilities essential for sustained survival and development. In contrast, robots today are primarily monolithic machines with limited ability to self-repair, physically develop, or…

Nanotechnology-based microscopic robots could provide accurate in vivo measurement of chemicals in the bloodstream for detailed biological research and as an aid to medical treatment. Quantitative performance estimates of such devices…

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…

Legged robots offer several advantages when navigating unstructured environments, but they often fall short of the efficiency achieved by wheeled robots. One promising strategy to improve their energy economy is to leverage their natural…

Exploring bodies of water on their surface allows robots to efficiently communicate and harvest energy from the sun. On the water surface, however, robots often face highly unstructured environments, cluttered with plant matter, animals,…

Amphibians adapt their morphologies and motions to accommodate movement in both terrestrial and aquatic environments. Inspired by these biological features, we present PuffyBot, an untethered shape morphing robot capable of changing its…