Physics of smart active matter: integrating active matter and control to gain insights into living systems

Levine, Herbert; Goldman, Daniel I.

doi:10.1039/d3sm00171g

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 36 publications

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“…Specifically, in groups of actively moving members one can apply statistical mechanics in order to understand and predict the group motion and density [28]. These works are related to the ongoing efforts to understand how information based interactions affect physical behavior of smart active systems [29][30][31][32].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emergent clustering due to quorum sensing interactions in active matter

Thapa,

Pinchasik,

Shokef

2024

New J. Phys.

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Many organisms in nature use local interactions to generate global cooperative phenomena. To unravel how the behavior of individuals generates effective interactions within a group, we introduce a simple model, wherein each agent senses the presence of others nearby and changes its physical motion accordingly. This generates non-physical, or virtual interactions between agents. We study the radial distribution function and the cluster size distribution to quantify the emergent interactions for both social and anti-social behavior; We identify social behavior as when an agent exhibits a tendency to remain in the vicinity of other agents, whereas anti-social behavior as when it displays a tendency to escape from the vicinity of others. Using Langevin dynamics simulations in two and three spatial dimensions, we discover that under certain conditions, positive correlations, which indicate attraction can emerge even in the case of anti-social behavior. Our results are potentially useful for designing robotic swimmers that can swim collectively only based on sensing the distance to their neighbors, without measuring any orientational information.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emergent clustering due to quorum sensing interactions in active matter

Thapa,

Pinchasik,

Shokef

2024

New J. Phys.

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Robo-Matter towards reconfigurable multifunctional smart materials

Wang,

Chen

et al. 2024

Nat Commun

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Maximizing materials utilization efficiency via enhancing their reconfigurability and multifunctionality offers a promising avenue in addressing the global challenges in sustainability. To this end, significant efforts have been made in developing reconfigurable multifunctional smart materials, which can exhibit remarkable behaviors such as morphing and self-healing. However, the difficulty in efficiently manipulating and controlling matter at the building block level with manageable cost and complexity, which is crucial to achieving superior responsiveness to environmental clues and stimuli, has significantly hindered the further development of such smart materials. Here we introduce a concept of Robo-Matter, which can be activated and controlled through external information exchange at the building block level, to enable a high-level of controllability, mutability and versatility for reconfigurable multifunctional smart materials. Using specially designed micro-robot building blocks with symmetry-breaking active motion modes, tunable anisotropic interactions, and interactive coupling with a programmable spatial-temporal dynamic light field, we demonstrate an emergent Robot-Matter duality, which enables a spectrum of desirable behaviors spanning from matter-like properties such as ultra-fast self-assembly and adaptivity, to robot-like properties including active force output, smart healing, smart morphing and infiltration. Our work demonstrates a promising direction for designing next-generation smart materials and large-scale robotic swarms.

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