Morphable thick-panel origami

Beyond being a traditional art form, origami can be applied to create complex deployable systems. Origami structures with one degree of freedom (DOF) are easy to actuate and have high stiffness but lack the ability to achieve different tasks. Previous multiple DOF origami structures are the opposite, having good task generalizability but low stiffness. In this paper, we design morphable origami structures with multiple one-DOF motion branches by using reconfigurable linkages. However, the kinematic models of previous thick-panel techniques are spherical linkages and overconstrained linkages, which limit the ability of structure morphing. This paper first proposes an approach to create reconfigurable linkages by connecting two one-DOF linkages and removing common parts. The new linkages have two motion branches corresponding to the two original linkages, and each motion branch is one-DOF. Then, we use the relationships between these reconfigurable linkages and thick-panel origami structures to construct morphable thickpanel origami structures. Furthermore, we also analyze their kinematics and motion branches. The concept of this paper, using reconfigurable linkages to design thick-panel origami structures, will improve the potential of origami techniques for different tasks.