The swimming trajectories of self-propelled organisms or synthetic devices in a viscous fluid can be altered by hydrodynamic interactions with nearby boundaries. We explore a multipole description of swimming bodies and provide a general framework for studying the fluid-mediated modifications to swimming trajectories. The validity of the far-field description is probed for a selection of model swimmers of varying geometry and propulsive activity by comparison with full numerical simulations.

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... reduced model is then used to deliver simple but accurate predictions of hydrodynamically generated wall attraction and pitching dynamics, and may help to explain a number of experimental results.