A touch of non-linearity in fluid fields: where spheres “think” collectively and swim together*

From crawling cells to orca whales, swimming in nature occurs at different scales. The study of swimming across length scales can shed light onto the biological functions of natural swimmers or inspire the design of artificial swimmers with applications ranging from targeted drug delivery to deep-water explorations. In this talk, I will present experiments and simulations of how oscillating spheres, universally simple geometric objects, can utilize non-linearities to demonstrate complex pattern formation in a granular system, or different swimming behaviors in a spherobot (robot made out of spheres) when placed in a fluid at intermediate Reynolds numbers, 1<Re.