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Updated: May 30, 2026

Bioinspired Soft Robot with Incorporated Microelectrodes
Published on: February 28, 2020
Collective beating of artificial microcilia
Naïs Coq1, Antoine Bricard, Francois-Damien Delapierre
1PMMH ESPCI-ParisTech-CNRS UMR-Universit Paris, France.
Abstract:
We combine technical, experimental, and theoretical efforts to investigate the collective dynamics of artificial microcilia in a viscous fluid. We take advantage of soft lithography and colloidal self-assembly to devise microcarpets made of hundreds of slender magnetic rods. This novel experimental setup is used to investigate the dynamics of extended cilia arrays driven by a precessing magnetic field. Whereas the dynamics of an isolated cilium is a rigid body rotation, collective beating results in a symmetry breaking of the precession patterns. The trajectories of the cilia are anisotropic and experience a significant structural evolution as the actuation frequency increases. We present a minimal model to account for our experimental findings and demonstrate how the global geometry of the array imposes the shape of the trajectories via long-range hydrodynamic interactions.
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