Publications related to Biomimetics

Additive Manufacturing of Bioinspired Mineral-Based Composites

Biominerals are used by natural organisms for example as structural supports and optical sensors. They are produced from a limited number of elements and under ambient conditions. Nevertheless, they often possess excellent mechanical properties and sometim ...

EPFL2024

Enhancing Chondrocyte Biosynthetic Activities: Harnessing the Power of Loading-Induced Evolved Temperature

Theofanis Stampoultzis

Chondrocytes within articular cartilage possess the capacity to perceive and react to signals generated by the typical load-bearing actions of daily life, such as walking or running. Articular cartilage is predominantly oriented toward compression-based fu ...

EPFL2024

A biohybrid interaction framework for the integration of robots in animal societies

Francesco Mondada, Daniel Burnier, Vaios Papaspyros, Raphael Cherfan

The collective behavior of animals has been traditionally studied through observation, quantitative models of behavior, and devices of low intelligence. Nowadays, the advancements in the field of robotics allow for closed-loop experiments that occur in rea ...

2023

Challenges and approaches in bridging the biomimicry gap in biohybrid systems of fish and robots

Vaios Papaspyros

As the field of ethology advances, especially over the past two decades, the role of animal-robot interaction tools has increasingly become essential. This importance arises from the need for controlled, repetitive, repeatable, and long-duration experiment ...

EPFL2023

Compliance-matching vascular grafts with personalization potential

Georgios Rovas

Aortic diseases are characterized by dire prognosis and inadequate diagnosis, owing to their insidious yet lethal nature. Aortopathies, namely aortic aneurysms and dissections, along with certain congenital diseases, might necessitate surgical replacement ...

EPFL2023

Puppeteer and Marionette: Learning Anticipatory Quadrupedal Locomotion Based on Interactions of a Central Pattern Generator and Supraspinal Drive

Auke Ijspeert, Guillaume Denis Antoine Bellegarda, Milad Shafiee Ashtiani

Quadruped animal locomotion emerges from the interactions between the spinal central pattern generator (CPG), sensory feedback, and supraspinal drive signals from the brain. Computational models of CPGs have been widely used for investigating the spinal co ...

IEEE2023

Selectively permeable microcapsules

Chuen-Ru Li

Microcapsules are appealing containers for delivering active ingredients, such as drugs and cosmetics, or conducting chemical and biological reactions on a small scale. To control the timing and location of release of these encapsulants, the shells of micr ...

EPFL2023

Controlling the Microstructure and Composition of 3D Printed Soft Load-Bearing Hydrogels

Matteo Hirsch

Hydrogels are among the first materials expressly designed for their use in biomedicine. However, state-of-the-art applications of hydrogels are severely limited because they are typically either too soft or too brittle such that they cannot bear significa ...

EPFL2023

Flexural-tensegrity snapping tails for bio-inspired propulsion in fluids

Pedro Miguel Nunes Pereira de Almeida Reis, Claudio Boni

Many aquatic animals propel themselves by flapping their tails. Leveraging a recently proposed snapping cantilever beam based on the concept of flexural tensegrity, we propose a bio-inspired propulsion device. The design comprises a segmental beam with hol ...

ELSEVIER2022

Not gone with the wind: Active microscale flight with highly porous bristled wings

Pedro Miguel Nunes Pereira de Almeida Reis, Yuexia Luna Lin

The finesse of sub-millimeter insect flight with comb-like bristled wings raises intriguing questions, not only on fluid-structure interactions (FSI) but also on the mechanical behavior of the underlying, highly porous structures. Farisenkov et al. charact ...

ELSEVIER2022

Micromechanically inspired investigation of cemented granular materials: part I-from X-ray micro tomography to measurable model variables

Gioacchino Viggiani, Edward Carlo Giorgio Andò

Cemented granular materials are abundant in nature and are often artificially produced. Their macroscopic behaviour is driven by small-scale material processes, which are generally classified as: grain breakage, cement damage and fragment rearrangement. Th ...

SPRINGER HEIDELBERG2022

From vesicles to materials: bioinspired strategies for fabricating hierarchically structured soft matter

Esther Amstad

Certain organisms including species of mollusks, polychaetes, onychophorans and arthropods produce exceptional polymeric materials outside their bodies under ambient conditions using concentrated fluid protein precursors. While much is understood about the ...

ROYAL SOC2021

Bio-Hybrid Systems for Ecosystem Level Effects

Francesco Mondada, Robert Thomas Edmund Mills, Robert Matthew Mills, Rafael Botner Barmak, Matthieu Jean-Michel Philippe Broisin, Martina Szopek, Jean-Louis Deneubourg

In a time marked by ecological decay and by the perspective of a severe backlash of this ecosystem decay and climate devastation onto human society, bold moves that employ novel technology to counteract this decline are required. We present a novel concept ...

MIT Press2021

Nacre-inspired Hard and Tough Materials

Esther Amstad, Huachuan Du

Nature fabricates materials with properties that are difficult to reproduce with manmade counterparts. For example, nacre, composed of layers of CaCO3 crystals that are interspaced with small quantities of organic components, is one of the toughest known b ...

2019

Design Methodology for Engineering Multifunctional Mesoscale Robots

Zhenishbek Zhakypov

In this thesis our research goal is to develop, study and demonstrate multifunctional multi-robot systems in mesoscale. Particularly, our goal is to study and demonstrate terrestrial multi-locomotion and collective behaviours with mesoscale robots, similar ...

EPFL2019

Designing Minimal and Scalable Insect-Inspired Multi-Locomotion Millirobots

Jamie Paik, Zhenishbek Zhakypov, Kazuaki Mori

In ant colonies, collectivity enables division of labour and resources with great scalability. Beyond their intricate social behaviours, individuals of the genus Odontomachus, also known as trap-jaw ants, have developed remarkable multi-locomotion mechanis ...

2019

Spontaneous Formation of CdSe Photoluminescent Nanotubes with Visible-Light Photocatalytic Performance

Martinus Gijs, Virendra Kumar Parashar, Xiaopeng Huang

Two-dimensional (2D) colloidal CdSe nanocrystals (NCs) with precise atomic-scale thickness have attracted intensive attention in recent years due to their optical properties and quantum confinement effects originating from their particular band structure. ...

2019

Bioinspired Hydrogels for 3D Organoid Culture

Matthias Lütolf, Delphine Lorraine Perle Blondel

Organoids have stepped into the limelight as unique in vitro systems for modeling organ development, function and disease. This review provides a perspective on how chemically defined, bio-inspired hydrogels could be used for replacing ill-defined matrices ...

SWISS CHEMICAL SOC2019

Jumping dynamics of aquatic animals

Emmanuel Georges Albert Virot

Jumping out of water is a phenomenon exhibited by a variety of aquatic and semi-aquatic animals. Yet, there is no common groundwork that clarifies the physical constraints required to jump out of water. In this study, we elucidate the physical conditions r ...

ROYAL SOC2019

How mimetic should a robotic fish be to socially integrate into zebrafish groups ?

Francesco Mondada, Alexey Gribovskiy, Frank Bonnet, Bertrand Eric Collignon

Biomimetic robots are promising tools in animal behavioural studies. If they are socially integrated in a group of animals, they can produce calibrated social stimuli to test the animal responses. However, the design of such social robots is challenging as ...

2018