Squigglebot: a battery powered spherical rolling robot as a model active matter system to measure its energetics

Abstract

Active matter systems use their internal or ambient source of energy and dissipate them at the scale of individual constituent particles to generate motion. Direct measurement of the energy influx for individual particles has not been achieved in the experiments. Here we present "Squigglebot" - a battery powered spherical rolling robot based on open source hardware as an artificial active matter system whose energy consumption as well as the energy dissipation into different modes of motion both can be measured experimentally. This can serve as a prototype system to study a number of interesting problems in non-equilibrium statistical physics, where details of the energetics are required.