In this paper we study a mathematical model of one-dimensional swimmers performing a planar motion while fully immersed in a viscous fluid. The swimmers are assumed to be of small size, and all inertial effects are neglected. Hydrodynamic interactions are treated in a simplified way, using the local drag approximation of resistive force theory. We prove existence and uniqueness of the solution of the equations of motion driven by shape changes of the swimmer. Moreover, we prove a controllability result showing that given any pair of initial and final states, there exists a history of shape changes such that the resulting motion takes the swimmer from the initial to the final state. We give a constructive proof, based on the composition of elementary maneuvers (straightening and its inverse, rotation, translation), each of which represents the solution of an interesting motion planning problem. Finally, we prove the existence of solutions for the optimal control problem of finding, among the histories of shape changes taking the swimmer from an initial to a final state, the one of minimal energetic cost.
A recent promising technique for robotic micro-swimmers is to endow them with a magnetization and apply an external magnetic field to provoke their deformation. In this note we consider a simple planar micro-swimmer model made of two magnetized segments connected by an elastic joint, controlled via a magnetic field. After recalling the analytical model, we establish a local controllability result around the straight position of the swimmer.
In the above mentioned note (<hal-01145537>, <arXiv:1506.05918>, published in IEEE Trans. Autom. Cont., 2017), the first and fourth authors proved a local controllability result around the straight configuration for a class of magneto-elastic micro-swimmers.That result is weaker than the usual small-time local controllability (STLC), and the authors left the STLC question open. The present addendum closes it by showing that these systems cannot be STLC.
The controllability of a fully three-dimensional $N$-link swimmer is studied. After deriving the equations of motion in a low Reynolds number fluid by means of Resistive Force Theory, the controllability of the minimal $2$-link swimmer is tackled using techniques from Geometric Control Theory. The shape of the $2$-link swimmer is described by two angle parameters. It is shown that the associated vector fields that govern the dynamics generate, via taking their Lie brackets, all six linearly independent directions in the configuration space; every direction and orientation can be achieved by op…
Swimming, i.e., being able to advance in the absence of external forces by performing cyclic shape changes, is particularly demanding at low Reynolds numbers which is the regime of interest for micro-organisms and micro-robots. We focus on self-propelled stokesian robots composed of assemblies of balls and we prove that the presence of a wall has an effect on their motility. More precisely, we demonstrate that a controllable swimmer remains controllable in a half space whereas the reachable set of a non fully controllable one is affected by the presence of a wall.
- In this paper, we focus on a variant of a 3-link magnetic microswimmer which consists of three rigid magnetized segments connected by two torsional springs. In particular, we assume that one of the springs is twisted so that the swimmer is not aligned at rest. By acting on it with an external magnetic field, the swimmer twists and moves through the surrounding fluid. By considering the external magnetic field as a control function, we state a local partial controllability result around the equilibrium states. Then, we propose a constructive method to find the magnetic field that allows the s…
We study the local controllability properties of 2D and 3D bio-mimetic swimmers employing the change of their geometric shape to propel themselves in an incompressible fluid described by Navier-Stokes equations. It is assumed that swimmers' bodies consist of finitely many parts, identified with the fluid they occupy, that are subsequently linked by the rotational and elastic internal forces. These forces are explicitly described and serve as the means to affect the geometric configuration of swimmers' bodies. Similar models were previously investigated in [6]-[13].
In this article, we consider a swimmer (i.e. a self-deformable body) immersed in a fluid, the flow of which is governed by the stationary Stokes equations. This model is relevant for studying the locomotion of microorganisms or micro robots for which the inertia effects can be neglected. Our first main contribution is to prove that any such microswimmer has the ability to track, by performing a sequence of shape changes, any given trajectory in the fluid. We show that, in addition, this can be done by means of arbitrarily small body deformations that can be superimposed to any preassigned sequ…
We study the effect of a rough wall on the controllability of micro-swimmers made of several balls linked by thin jacks: the so-called 3-sphere and 4-sphere swimmers. We show that a controllable swimmer (the 4-sphere swimmer) is not impacted by the roughness. On the contrary, we show that the roughness changes the dynamics of the 3-sphere swimmer, so that it can reach any direction almost everywhere.
This paper is devoted to study the controllability of a one-dimensional fluid-particle interaction model where the fluid follows the viscous Burgers equation and the point mass obeys Newton's second law. We prove the null controllability for the velocity of the fluid and the particle and an approximate controllability for the position of the particle with a control variable acting only on the particle. One of the novelties of our work is the fact that we achieve this controllability result in a uniform time for all initial data and without any smallness assumptions on the initial data.
In this work, we are interested in the small time global null controllability for the viscous Burgers' equation y_t - y_xx + y y_x = u(t) on the line segment [0,1]. The second-hand side is a scalar control playing a role similar to that of a pressure. We set y(t,1) = 0 and restrict ourselves to using only two controls (namely the interior one u(t) and the boundary one y(t,0)). In this setting, we show that small time global null controllability still holds by taking advantage of both hyperbolic and parabolic behaviors of our system. We use the Cole-Hopf transform and Fourier series to derive p…
The paper is devoted to studying the 1D viscous Burgers equation controlled by an external force. It is assumed that the initial state is essentially bounded, with no decay condition at infinity, and the control is a trigonometric polynomial of low degree with respect to the space variable. We construct explicitly a control space of dimension 11 that enables one to steer the system to any neighbourhood of a given final state in local topologies. The proof of this result is based on an adaptation of the Agrachev-Sarychev approach to the case of an unbounded domain.
Swimming consists by definition in propelling through a fluid by means of bodily movements. Thus, from a mathematical point of view, swimming turns into a control problem for which the controls are the deformations of the swimmer. The aim of this paper is to present a unified geometric approach for the optimization of the body deformations of so-called driftless swimmers. The class of driftless swimmers includes, among other, swimmers in a 3D Stokes flow (case of micro-swimmers in viscous fluids) or swimmers in a 2D or 3D potential flow. A general framework is introduced, allowing the complete…
In this work, we are interested in the small time local null controllability for the viscous Burgers' equation $y_t - y_{xx} + y y_x = u(t)$ on the line segment $[0,1]$, with null boundary conditions. The second-hand side is a scalar control playing a role similar to that of a pressure. In this setting, the classical Lie bracket necessary condition $[f_1,[f_1,f_0]]$ introduced by Sussmann fails to conclude. However, using a quadratic expansion of our system, we exhibit a second order obstruction to small time local null controllability. This obstruction holds although the information propagati…
This article presents a computational approach for determining the optimal slip velocities on any given shape of an axisymmetric micro-swimmer suspended in a viscous fluid. The objective is to minimize the power loss to maintain a target swimming speed, or equivalently to maximize the efficiency of the micro-swimmer. Owing to the linearity of the Stokes equations governing the fluid motion, we show that this PDE-constrained optimization problem reduces to a simpler quadratic optimization problem, whose solution is found using a high-order accurate boundary integral method. We consider various …
We study controllability issues for the 2D Euler and Navier-Stokes (NS) systems under periodic boundary conditions. These systems describe motion of homogeneous ideal or viscous incompressible fluid on a two-dimensional torus $\mathbb{T}^2$. We assume the system to be controlled by a degenerate forcing applied to fixed number of modes. In our previous work \cite{ASpb,AS43,ASDAN} we studied global controllability by means of degenerate forcing for Navier-Stokes (NS) systems with nonvanishing viscosity ($ν>0$). Methods of differential geometric/Lie algebraic control theory have been used for tha…
We study a damped scalar conservation law driven by the sum of a fixed external force and a localised one-dimensional control. The problem is considered in a bounded domain and is supplemented with the Dirichlet boundary condition. It is proved that any solution of the uncontrolled equation can be exponentially stabilised. As a consequence, we obtain the global approximate controllability to trajectories by a one-dimensional localised control.
The aim of this paper is to answer the question: Do the controls of a vanishing viscosity approximation of the one dimensional linear wave equation converge to a control of the conservative limit equation? Our viscous term contains the fractional power of the Dirichlet Laplace operator and it is multiplied by a small parameter devoted to tend to zero. Our analysis, based on moment problems and biorthogonal sequences, enables us to evaluate the magnitude of the controls needed for each eigenmode and to show their uniform boundedness with respect to the vanishing parameter.
We are interested by the controllability of a fluid-structure interaction system where the fluid is viscous and incompressible and where the structure is elastic and located on a part of the boundary of the fluid's domain. In this article, we simplify this system by considering a linearization and by replacing the wave/plate equation for the structure by a heat equation. We show that the corresponding system coupling the Stokes equations with a heat equation at its boundary is null-controllable. The proof is based on Carleman estimates and interpolation inequalities. One of the Carleman estima…
In this paper, we consider the wave equation with both a viscous Kelvin-Voigt and frictional damping as a model of viscoelasticity in which we incorporate an internal control with a moving support. We prove the null controllability when the control region, driven by the flow of an ODE, covers all the domain. The proof is based upon the interpretation of the system as, roughly, the coupling of a heat equation with an ordinary differential equation (ODE). The presence of the ODE for which there is no propagation along the space variable makes the controllability of the system impossible when the…
The connection between swimming and control theory is attracting increasing attention in the recent literature. Starting from an idea of Alberto Bressan [7] we study the system of a planar body whose position and shape are described by a finite number of parameters, and is immersed in a 2-dimensional ideal and in-compressible fluid in terms of gauge field on the space of shapes. We focus on a class of deformations measure preserving which are diffeomeorphisms whose existence is ensured by the Riemann Mapping Theorem. We face a crucial problem: the pres-ence of possible non vanishing initial im…
We consider the 1D viscous Burgers equation with a control localised in a finite interval. It is proved that, for any $\varepsilon>0$, one can find a time $T$ of order $\log\varepsilon^{-1}$ such that any initial state can be steered to the $\varepsilon$-neighbourhood of a given trajectory at time $T$. This property combined with an earlier result on local exact controllability shows that the Burgers equation is globally exactly controllable to trajectories in a finite time. We also prove that the approximate controllability to arbitrary targets does not hold even if we allow infinite time of …
Any swimmer embedded on a inertialess fluid must perform a non-reciprocal motion to swim forward. The archetypal demonstration of this unique motion-constraint was introduced by Purcell with the so-called "scallop theorem". Scallop here is a minimal mathematical model of a swimmer composed by two arms connected via a hinge whose periodic motion (of opening and closing its arms) is not sufficient to achieve net displacement. Any source of incongruence on the motion or in the forces/torques experienced by such time-reversible scallop will break the symmetry imposed by the Stokes linearity and le…
We study the rapid stabilization of the heat equation on the 1-dimensional torus using the backstepping method with a Fredholm transformation. We prove that, under some assumption on the control operator, two scalar controls are necessary and sufficient to get controllability and rapid stabilization. This classical framework allows us to present the backstepping method with Fredholm transformations on Laplace operators in a sharp functional setting, which is the main objective of this work. Finally, we prove that the same Fredholm transformation also leads to the local rapid stability of the v…
