Soft robotic origami crawler.

Biomimetic soft robotic crawlers have attracted extensive attention in various engineering fields, owing to their adaptivity to different terrains. Earthworm-like crawlers realize locomotion through in-plane contraction, while inchworm-like crawlers exhibit out-of-plane bending-based motions. Although in-plane contraction crawlers demonstrate effective motion in confined spaces, miniaturization is challenging because of limited actuation methods and complex structures.

Untethered control of functional origami microrobots with distributed actuation.

Deployability, multifunctionality, and tunability are features that can be explored in the design space of origami engineering solutions. These features arise from the shape-changing capabilities of origami assemblies, which require effective actuation for full functionality. Current actuation strategies rely on either slow or tethered or bulky actuators (or a combination).

Folding at the Microscale: Enabling Multifunctional 3D Origami-Architected Metamaterials.

Mechanical metamaterials inspired by the Japanese art of paper folding have gained considerable attention because of their potential to yield deployable and highly tunable assemblies. The inherent foldability of origami structures enlarges the material design space with remarkable properties such as auxeticity and high deformation recoverability and deployability, the latter being key in applications where spatial constraints are pivotal. This work integrates the results of the design, 3D direct laser writing fabrication, and in situ scanning electron microscopic mechanical characterization of microscale origami metamaterials, based on the multimodal assembly of Miura-Ori tubes.

Continuous-range tunable multilayer frequency-selective surfaces using origami and inkjet printing.

The tremendous increase in the number of components in typical electrical and communication modules requires low-cost, flexible and multifunctional sensing, energy harvesting, and communication modules that can readily reconfigure, depending on changes in their environment. Current subtractive manufacturing-based reconfigurable systems offer limited flexibility (limited finite number of discrete reconfiguration states) and have high fabrication cost and time requirements. Thus, this paper introduces an approach to solve the problem by combining additive manufacturing and origami principles to realize tunable electrical components that can be reconfigured over continuous-state ranges from folded (compact) to unfolded (large surface) configurations.