<p>&nbsp; Rigid origami, a mechanism made of rigid panels and hinges, has been a source of inspiration for novel deployable structures, robots, and transformable cellular materials.&nbsp;In particular, a&nbsp;serial chain of rigid origami structures has&nbsp;the&nbsp;ability to transform overall shapes by only manipulating one end. However, existing mechanisms based on&nbsp;the&nbsp;serial chain of rigid origami are one-degree-of-freedom (DOF), so its extension, bending curvature, and&nbsp;bending&nbsp;direction&nbsp;cannot be separately controlled. Our objective is to create&nbsp;a&nbsp;serially connected multi-DOF origami system that can be controlled only from one end.&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;This paper proposes&nbsp;a family of 3-DOF mechanisms&nbsp;that can extend, bend, and turn by serially connecting rigid origami modules. We obtain this structure by creating a 3-DOF rigid origami module that takes&nbsp;a&nbsp;three-value input and gives&nbsp;a&nbsp;three-value output. In this way, the motion of one module is copied to the adjacent module, and&nbsp;the overall motion propagates&nbsp;through the chain mechanism.&nbsp;First,&nbsp;we&nbsp;show&nbsp;the geometric principle for the module and its implementation using rigid origami. Then, we illustrate how three parameters in each module define the overall shape characterized by extension, bending, and turning. Furthermore, we&nbsp;numerically&nbsp;solved inverse kinematics to provide the composition of&nbsp;particular motions&nbsp;that can be useful for robotics.&nbsp;&nbsp;In particular, a&nbsp;torus mechanism with 2 DOF is proposed. Finally, we show the physical prototype and their fabrication based on origami.&nbsp;</p>

Serial Chain of Rigid Origami That Extends, Bends and Turns

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IDETC-CIE/IDETC-CIE2021/volume/85369

ASME 2021 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE2021)

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