arXiv subjects

Yuki Takaha

Publications and source records attributed to Yuki Takaha.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Automated design of soft-rigid hybrid robots for dynamic locomotion

Rigid-bodied robots often lack compliance needed to adapt to unstructured environments, while fully soft robots, though highly adaptable, struggle with scalability and load capacity. In nature, musculoskeletal systems balance strength and flexibility by integrating hard and soft tissues. Inspired by this principle, we present an automated design method for soft-rigid hybrids that optimizes a freeform soft-body shape, a stiff truss layout, and multi-channel actuation. Our differentiable simulator couples the material point method (MPM) for deformable bodies with extended position-based dynamics (XPBD) for truss elements, enabling gradient-based search. The optimization generates truss skeletons that transmit actuation forces to the soft body. We fabricate the optimized design and evaluate it on a walking task. Experiments reproduce the walking mode predicted by the optimization, which does not emerge without the skeleton. Modal analysis further suggests that the skeleton enables deformation modes near the actuation frequency that promote effective stride generation.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2024

Avalanche criticality emerges by thermal fluctuation in a quiescent glass

We report avalanche criticality of thermal relaxation in glassy systems after a rapid quench by molecular simulation. Our analysis of the energy landscape and the scaling reveals that particle rearrangement is critical. The critical phenomenon has the same origin as avalanches in sheared amorphous solids, but the critical exponent differs from previously observed. Our results suggest that by viewing a glass as a thermally driven elastoplastic material, we can understand dynamics below the glass transition point, such as aging.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2023

Arrhenius temperature dependence of the crystallization time of deeply supercooled liquids

Usually, supercooled liquids and glasses are thermodynamically unstable against crystallization. Classical nucleation theory (CNT) has been used to describe the crystallization dynamics of supercooled liquids. However, recent studies on overcompressed hard spheres show that their crystallization dynamics are intermittent and mediated by avalanche-like rearrangements of particles, which largely differ from the CNT. These observations suggest that the crystallization times of deeply supercooled liquids or glasses cannot be described by the CNT, but this point has not yet been studied in detail. In this paper, we use molecular dynamics simulations to study the crystallization dynamics of soft spheres just after an instantaneous quench. We show that although the equilibrium relaxation time increases in a super-Arrhenius manner with decreasing temperature, the crystallization time shows an Arrhenius temperature dependence at very low temperatures. This is contrary to the conventional formula based on the CNT. Furthermore, the estimated energy barrier for the crystallization is surprisingly small compared to that for the equilibrium dynamics. By comparing the crystallization and aging dynamics quantitatively, we show that a coupling between aging and crystallization is the key for understanding the rapid crystallization of deeply supercooled liquids or glasses.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2022

Quasi-two-dimensional bacterial swimming around pillars: enhanced trapping efficiency and curvature dependence

Microswimmers exhibit more diverse behavior in quasi-two dimensions than in three dimensions. Such behavior remains elusive due to the analytical difficulty of dealing with two parallel solid boundaries. The existence of additional obstacles in quasi-two dimensional systems further complicates the analysis. Combining experiments and hydrodynamic simulations, we investigate how the spatial dimension affects the interactions between microswimmers and obstacles. We fabricated microscopic pillars in quasi-two dimensions by etching glass coverslips and observed bacterial swimming among the pillars. Bacteria got trapped around the circular pillars and the trapping efficiency increased as the quasi-two-dimensionality was increased or as the curvature of the pillars was decreased. Numerical simulations of the simplest situation of a confined squirmer showed anomalous increase of hydrodynamic attractions, establishing that the enhanced interaction is a universal property of quasi-two-dimensional microhydrodynamics. We also demonstrated that the local curvature of the obstacle controls the trapping efficiency by experiments with elliptic pillars.

cond-mat.soft↗