6 papers
Multimodal motion and behavior switching of multistable ciliary walkers
Sumit Mohanty, Paul Baconnier, Harmannus A. H. Schomaker +3
The collective motion of arrays of cilia - tiny, hairlike protrusions - drives the locomotion of numerous microorganisms, enabling multimodal motion and autonomous switching betwee…
Flexel ecosystem: simulating mechanical systems from entities with arbitrarily complex mechanical responses
Paul Ducarme, Bart Weber, Martin van Hecke +1
Nonlinearities and instabilities in mechanical structures have shown great promise for embedding advanced functionalities. However, simulating structures subject to nonlinearities…
Embodying mechano-fluidic memory in soft machines to program behaviors upon interactions
Alberto Comoretto, Tanaya Mandke, Johannes T. B. Overvelde
Soft machines display shape adaptation to external circumstances due to their intrinsic compliance. To achieve increasingly more responsive behaviors upon interactions without rely…
Physical synchronization of soft self-oscillating limbs for fast and autonomous locomotion
Alberto Comoretto, Harmannus A. H. Schomaker, Johannes T. B. Overvelde
Animals achieve robust locomotion by offloading regulation from the brain to physical couplings within the body. In contrast, locomotion in artificial systems often depends on cent…
A Retrofit Sensing Strategy for Soft Fluidic Robots
Shibo Zou, Sergio Picella, Jelle de Vries +3
Soft robots are intrinsically capable of adapting to different environments by changing their shape in response to interaction forces with the environment. However, sensing and fee…
Crack initiation in viscoelastic materials
Yuval Mulla, Giorgio Oliveri, Johannes T. B. Overvelde +1
In viscoelastic materials, individually short-lived bonds collectively result in a mechanical resistance which is long-lived but finite, as ultimately cracks appear. Here we provid…