Adaptive locomotion of artificial microswimmers

Abstract

Bacteria can exploit mechanics to display remarkable plasticity in response to locally changing physical and chemical conditions. Compliant structures play a striking role in their taxis behavior, specifically for navigation inside complex and structured environments. Bioinspired mechanisms with rationally designed architectures capable of large, nonlinear deformation present opportunities for introducing autonomy into engineered small-scale devices. This work analyzes the effect of hydrodynamic forces and rheology of local surroundings on swimming at low Reynolds number, identifies the challenges and benefits of utilizing elastohydrodynamic coupling in locomotion, and further develops a suite of machinery for building untethered microrobots with self-regulated mobility. We demonstrate that coupling the structural and magnetic properties of artificial microswimmers with the dynamic properties of the fluid leads to adaptive locomotion in the absence of on-board sensors.

References in corpus (6)

• Swimming in circles: Motion of bacteria near solid boundaries
• Bacterial hydrodynamics
• High-Speed Propulsion of Flexible Nanowire Motors: Theory and Experiments
• Flagellated bacterial motility in polymer solutions
• Experimental Investigations of Elastic Tail Propulsion at Low Reynolds Number
• Osmotaxis in Escherichia coli through changes in motor speed

Cited by in corpus (27)

• Motility-induced temperature difference in coexisting phases
• Tuning the random walk of active colloids
• Flow-driven robotic navigation of microengineered endovascular probes
• Reconfigurable Artificial Microswimmers with Internal Feedback
• Self-learning how to swim at low Reynolds number
• Axisymmetric Squirmers in Stokes Fluid with Nonuniform Viscosity
• The 2024 Motile Active Matter Roadmap
• Soft magnetic microrobot doped with porous silica for stability-enhanced multimodal locomotion in nonideal environment
• Tuning upstream swimming of micro-robots by shape and cargo size
• Low-Reynolds-number, bi-flagellated Quincke swimmers with multiple forms of motion
• Magnetically powered metachronal waves induce locomotion in self-assemblies
• Optimal navigation of microswimmers in complex and noisy environments
• Harnessing elasticity to generate self-oscillation via an electrohydrodynamic instability
• Shape curvature effects in viscous streaming
• Local drag of a slender rod parallel to a plane wall in a viscous fluid
• The statistical properties of turbulence in the presence of a smart small-scale control
• The Effect of Flagella Stiffness on the Locomotion of a Multi-Flagellated Robot at Low Reynolds Environment
• Geometric phase methods with Stokes theorem for a general viscous swimmer
• Folding-unfolding transition of active polymer on the reconfiguration of bidirectional tangential active force
• A critical assessment of reinforcement learning methods for microswimmer navigation in complex flows
• Effective and efficient modeling of the hydrodynamics for bacterial flagella
• Effects of Flagellar Morphology on Swimming Performance and Directional Control in Microswimmers
• Memory effects, arches and polar defect ordering at the cross-over from wet to dry active nematics
• A swimming bacterium in a two-fluid model of a polymer solution
• Effective extensional-torsional elasticity and dynamics of helical filaments under distributed loads
• Corkscrew motion of Trypanosoma brucei is driven by helical beating of the flagellum and facilitated by its bent shape
• Instability and self-propulsion of flexible autophoretic filaments