Autonomous navigation of shape-shifting microswimmers

We describe a method for programming the autonomous navigation of active colloidal particles in response to spatial gradients in a scalar stimulus. Functional behaviors such as positive or negative chemotaxis are encoded in the particle shape, which responds to the local stimulus and directs self-propelled particle motions. We demonstrate this approach using a physical model of stimuli-responsive clusters of self-phoretic spheres. We show how multiple autonomous behaviors can be achieved by designing the particle geometry and its stimulus response.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  Physical Review Research

• Publication date

  2019-08-16

• Fields of study

  Physics, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1103/PhysRevResearch.1.032030arXiv 1908.05808
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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