Title: 
"Stroke Optimization for Microswimmers using the Boundary Element
Method"


Abstract: 
Swimming, i.e., being able to advance in a fluid in the absence of
external propulsive forces by performing cyclic shape changes, is
particularly demanding at low Reynolds numbers. 

This is the regime of interest for microorganisms
and micro- or nano-robots, where hydrodynamics is governed by
Stokes equations, and swimming is complicated by the fact that
inertial effects are negligible, and viscosity dominates over all
participating forces.
We reformulate the swimming problem in the context of Control Theory,
and show global controllability, as well as some existence results for
a general class of microswimmers. 
For a subset of this class, we present a numerical approximation scheme
based on Boundary Element Methods (BEM) and reduced space Successive
Quadratic Programming (rSQP) that is capable of computing efficiently
optimal strokes for a variety of micro swimmers, both biological and
artificial, of which we show some significant examples.