2025/06/25 by Juan Pablo Carrillo-Mora, Carrillo-Mora, Juan Pablo, Adrià Garcés +3 · 1 citation
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Control and Dynamics of Mobile Robots #FOS: Physical sciences #Micro and Nano Robotics #Modular Robots and Swarm Intelligence #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft) #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2506.20610
openalex publication_date 2025/06/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/09 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We study experimentally, numerically and analytically, the dynamics of a chiral active particle (cm-sized robots), pulled at a constant translational velocity. We show that the system can be mapped to a Brownian particle driven across a periodic potential landscape, and thus exhibits a rotational depinning transition in the noiseless limit, giving rise to a creep regime in the presence of rotational diffusion. We show that a simple model of chiral, self-aligning, active particles accurately describes such dynamics. The steady-state distribution and escape times from local potential barriers, corresponding to long-lived orientations of the particles, can be computed exactly within the model and is in excellent agreement with both experiments and particle-based simulations, with no fitting parameters. Our work thus consolidates such self-propelled robots as a model system for the study of chiral active matter, and highlights the interesting dynamics arising from the interplay between external and internal driving forces in the presence of a self-aligning torque.