Wake Up to the Past: Using Memory to Model Fluid Wake Effects on Robots

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Vendruscolo, Luca, Sebastián, Eduardo, Prorok, Amanda, Shankar, Ajay
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Vendruscolo, Luca
Sebastián, Eduardo
Prorok, Amanda
Shankar, Ajay
author_facet Vendruscolo, Luca
Sebastián, Eduardo
Prorok, Amanda
Shankar, Ajay
contents Autonomous aerial and aquatic robots that attain mobility by perturbing their medium, such as multicopters and torpedoes, produce wake effects that act as disturbances for adjacent robots. Wake effects are hard to model and predict due to the chaotic spatio-temporal dynamics of the fluid, entangled with the physical geometry of the robots and their complex motion patterns. Data-driven approaches using neural networks typically learn a memory-less function that maps the current states of the two robots to a force observed by the "sufferer" robot. Such models often perform poorly in agile scenarios: since the wake effect has a finite propagation time, the disturbance observed by a sufferer robot is some function of relative states in the past. In this work, we present an empirical study of the properties a wake-effect predictor must satisfy to accurately model the interactions between two robots mediated by a fluid. We explore seven data-driven models designed to capture the spatio-temporal evolution of fluid wake effects in four different media. This allows us to introspect the models and analyze the reasons why certain features enable improved accuracy in prediction across predictors and fluids. As experimental validation, we develop a planar rectilinear gantry for two spinning monocopters to test in real-world data with feedback control. The conclusion is that support of history of previous states as input and transport delay prediction substantially helps to learn an accurate wake-effect predictor.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_22472
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Wake Up to the Past: Using Memory to Model Fluid Wake Effects on Robots
Vendruscolo, Luca
Sebastián, Eduardo
Prorok, Amanda
Shankar, Ajay
Robotics
Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
Autonomous aerial and aquatic robots that attain mobility by perturbing their medium, such as multicopters and torpedoes, produce wake effects that act as disturbances for adjacent robots. Wake effects are hard to model and predict due to the chaotic spatio-temporal dynamics of the fluid, entangled with the physical geometry of the robots and their complex motion patterns. Data-driven approaches using neural networks typically learn a memory-less function that maps the current states of the two robots to a force observed by the "sufferer" robot. Such models often perform poorly in agile scenarios: since the wake effect has a finite propagation time, the disturbance observed by a sufferer robot is some function of relative states in the past. In this work, we present an empirical study of the properties a wake-effect predictor must satisfy to accurately model the interactions between two robots mediated by a fluid. We explore seven data-driven models designed to capture the spatio-temporal evolution of fluid wake effects in four different media. This allows us to introspect the models and analyze the reasons why certain features enable improved accuracy in prediction across predictors and fluids. As experimental validation, we develop a planar rectilinear gantry for two spinning monocopters to test in real-world data with feedback control. The conclusion is that support of history of previous states as input and transport delay prediction substantially helps to learn an accurate wake-effect predictor.
title Wake Up to the Past: Using Memory to Model Fluid Wake Effects on Robots
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22472