2024/09/03 by Jake Buzhardt, Phanindra Tallapragada, Buzhardt, Jake +1 · 1 citation
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Dynamical Systems (math.DS) #FOS: Electrical engineering #FOS: Mathematics #Lattice Boltzmann Simulation Studies #Micro and Nano Robotics #Modular Robots and Swarm Intelligence #Optimization and Control (math.OC) #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2409.04468
openalex publication_date 2024/09/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Torque-driven microscale swimming robots, or microrotors, hold significant potential in biomedical applications such as targeted drug delivery, minimally invasive surgery, and micromanipulation. This paper addresses the challenge of controlling the transport of fluid volumes using the flow fields generated by interacting groups of microrotors. Our approach uses polynomial chaos expansions to model the time evolution of fluid particle distributions and formulate an optimal control problem, which we solve numerically. We implement this framework in simulation to achieve the controlled transport of an initial fluid particle distribution to a target destination while minimizing undesirable effects such as stretching and mixing. We consider the case where translational velocities of the rotors are directly controlled, as well as the case where only torques are controlled and the rotors move in response to the collective flow fields they generate. We analyze the solution of this optimal control problem by computing the Lagrangian coherent structures of the associated flow field, which reveal the formation of transport barriers that efficiently guide particles toward their target. This analysis provides insights into the underlying mechanisms of controlled transport.