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Gazzola, Mattia

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Gazzola

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Mattia

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Gazzola, Mattia

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2015 - 20162

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Author's Publications: search.filters.isAuthorOfPublication.b6f2dd05-f8be-41d6-bc4e-1c4cd0e35a12

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    Phototactic guidance of a tissue-engineered soft-robotic ray
    (American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 2016) Park, Sung-Jin; Gazzola, Mattia; Park, Kyung; Park, Shirley; Di Santo, Valentina; Blevins, Erin; Lind, Johan; Campbell, Patrick; Dauth, Stephanie; Capulli, Andrew; Pasqualini, Francesco; Ahn, Seungkuk; Cho, Alexander; Yuan, Hongyan; Maoz, Ben; Vijaykumar, Ragu; Choi, Jeong-Woo; Deisseroth, Karl; Lauder, George; Mahadevan, Lakshminarayanan; Parker, Kevin
    Inspired by the relatively simple morphological blueprint provided by batoid fish such as stingrays and skates, we create a biohybrid system that enables an artificial animal, a tissue-engineered ray, to swim and phototactically follow a light cue. By patterning dissociated rat cardiac myocytes on an elastomeric body enclosing a microfabricated gold skeleton, we replicated fish morphology at one-tenth scale and captured basic fin deflection patterns of batoid fish. Optogenetics allows for phototactic guidance, steering and turning maneuvers. Optical stimulation induced sequential muscle activation via serpentine patterned muscle circuits leading to coordinated undulatory swimming. The speed and direction of the ray was controlled by modulating light frequency and by independently eliciting right and left fins, allowing the biohybrid machine to maneuver through an obstacle course.
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    Gait and speed selection in slender inertial swimmers
    (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015) Gazzola, Mattia; Argentina, Médéric; Mahadevan, Lakshminarayanan
    Inertial swimmers use flexural movements to push water and generate thrust. We quantify this dynamical process for a slender body in a fluid by accounting for passive elasticity and hydrodynamics and active muscular force generation and proprioception. Our coupled elastohydrodynamic model takes the form of a nonlinear eigenvalue problem for the swimming speed and locomotion gait. The solution of this problem shows that swimmers use quantized resonant interactions with the fluid environment to enhance speed and efficiency. Thus, a fish is like an optimized diode that converts a prescribed alternating transverse motion to forward motion. Our results also allow for a broad comparative view of swimming locomotion and provide a mechanistic basis for the empirical relation linking the swimmer’s speed U, length L, and tail beat frequency f, given by U=L∼f [Bainbridge R (1958) J Exp Biol 35:109–133]. Furthermore, we show that a simple form of proprioceptive sensory feedback, wherein local muscle activation is function of body curvature, suffices to drive elastic instabilities associated with thrust production and leads to a spontaneous swimming gait without the need for a central pattern generator. Taken together, our results provide a simple mechanistic view of swimming consistent with natural observations and suggest ways to engineer artificial swimmers for optimal performance.