[2603.22472] Wake Up to the Past: Using Memory to Model Fluid Wake Effects on Robots

Computer Science > Robotics arXiv:2603.22472 (cs) [Submitted on 23 Mar 2026] Title:Wake Up to the Past: Using Memory to Model Fluid Wake Effects on Robots Authors:Luca Vendruscolo, Eduardo Sebastián, Amanda Prorok, Ajay Shankar View a PDF of the paper titled Wake Up to the Past: Using Memory to Model Fluid Wake Effects on Robots, by Luca Vendruscolo and 3 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract: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 introspe...