Natural creatures, from fish and cephalopods to snakes and birds, combine neural control, sensory feedback and compliant mechanics to effectively operate across dynamic, uncertain environments. In order to facilitate the understanding of the biophysical mechanisms at play and to streamline their potential use in engineering applications, we present here a versatile numerical approach to the simulation of musculoskeletal architectures. It relies on the assembly of heterogenous, active and passive Cosserat rods into dynamic structures that model bones, tendons, ligaments, fibers and muscle connectivity. We demonstrate its utility in a range of problems involving biological and soft robotic scenarios across scales and environments: from the engineering of millimeter-long bio-hybrid robots to the synthesis and reconstruction of complex musculoskeletal systems. The versatility of this methodology offers a framework to aid forward and inverse bioengineering designs as well as fundamental discovery in the functioning of living organisms.

We investigate the capability of an active body (master) to manipulate a passive object (slave) purely via contactless flow-mediated mechanisms, motivated by potential applications in microfluidic devices and medicine (drug delivery purposes). We extend prior works on active-passive cylinder pairs by superimposing periodic oscillations to the master's linear motion. In a viscous fluid, such oscillations produce an additional viscous streaming field, which is leveraged for enhancing slave transport. We see that superimposing oscillations robustly improves transport across a range of Reynolds numbers. Comparison with results without oscillations highlights the flow mechanisms at work, which we capitalize on to design (master) geometries for augmented transport. These principles are found to extend to three-dimensional active-passive shapes as well. * Electronic address: mgazzola@illinois.edu arXiv:1809.04566v1 [physics.flu-dyn]

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