Delighted to share my pedagogical article where I introduce active soft condensed matter and its relevance to the biological sciences in clear, accessible language.
Grateful to the Resonance editorial team for the opportunity.
www.ias.ac.in/describe/art...
Students' group
The Guest
Today, we attended the department seminar delivered by Professor Nitin Kumar from IIT Bombay, titled "Exploring the Physics of Living Systems Using Programmable Self-Propelled Robots."
Thrilled to announce that this work has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters. 😃
journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...
In another exciting development our new preprint is online:
www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...
This is the work of my brilliant graduate student Katerina Kourkoulou in collaboration with Maggie Liu and Arnold Mathijssen. Here is a video of the subject of our study:
Yes all well. Consider visiting IIT Bombay sometime in the future. Would love to know your cool research!
Congratulations Shailaja 🎉..my best wishes🙏🏼
Very happy that the first article from my postdoc work in the Tomancak lab is now published @PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/.... We studied the self-organization of actin in aggregates made from Hydra cells. Thread below (1/9)
Published in Langmuir today!
pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....
Dreaming of a swimming pool? Bacteria are surrounded by water! Water capillary forces organize bacterial colonies into gas, nematic streams, or droplet states. New paper @natphys.nature.com led by Matt Black and Chenyi Fei, with Ned Wingreen and Josh Shaevitz!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Preprint alert 📣! We provide an experimental protocol to align clay nanotubes over the entire dried deposit in spite of huge size-polydispersity. Experiments by my postdoc Arun Dadwal. Supported by @iitbombay.bsky.social
arxiv.org/html/2505.03...
(6/6) We quantify RT motion in terms of tumbling rate and show its systematic variation as a function of various experimental parameters. Our theoretical model reproduces experiments and elucidates the physics of underlying phenomena. More details in the preprint. Thanks😃
(5/6) Key to this RT motion is our robot's rolling-without-slipping, inertia-less active motion, which is expected in microswimmers. To confirm this, we used a slippery surface coated with coconut oil and found that the sudden tumble events smoothened out and vanished completely.
(4/6) When robots are programmed to execute overdamped active Brownian (AB) motion, voila, RT motion emerges, featuring abrupt tumbling events and exponential run-time distributions.
(3/6) Inspired by that, we create a robotic organism: two self-propelled robots connected by a rigid rod. Here, robots mimic flagella, and the rod acts as the organism's body. The rod rotates freely in a plane, with its ends pivoted at mirror-symmetric points on each robot.
(2/6) Microswimmers like bacteria and algae use active units, called cilia or flagella, to attain motility in a low Re environment. Flagella undergo a series of synchronous and asynchronous beating cycles to produce straight trajectories (runs) and sudden random turns (tumbles).
(1/6) 📢Excited to share our latest work in collaboration with @harshIITMandi's group at IIT Mandi on an artificial robotic system 🤖, in experiment and theory, mimicking run-and-tumble (RT) motion seen in microorganisms 🦠. 🧵⏬
arxiv.org/abs/2502.01257
A short video highlighting our research on the physics of homing behavior in animals, recently published in PRX Life journal.
youtu.be/Pr0UdzK7kyg?...
I do the same and I have also seen similar ones. And yes my primary objective is also that they go through the course content and at least learn something in the process 😃
As part of the institute's outreach program #TechConnect #TechFest2024, our group showcased a hands-on experience with our active robots, demonstrating how we engineer them to uncover the physics of #LivingMatter and #ActiveMatter @IITBombay
Congratulations Shila..👏🏼
Add me also. Thank you 😊
Add me as well. Thanks :)
