Folding and Unfolding Origami Tessellation by Reusing Folding Path
Zhonghua Xi and Jyh-Ming Lien
Abstract
Recent advances in robotics engineering have enabled the realization of self-folding machines. Rigid origami is usually used as the underlying model for the self-folding machines whose surface remains rigid during folding except at joints. A key issue in designing rigid origami is foldability that concerns about finding folding steps from a flat sheet of crease pattern to a desired folded state. Although recent computational methods allow rapid simulation of folding process of certain rigid origamis, these methods can fail even when the input crease pattern is extremely simple. In this paper, we take on the challenge of planning folding and unfolding motion of origami tessellations, which are composed of repetitive crease patterns. The number of crease lines of a tessellation is usually large, thus searching in such high dimensional configuration space with the requirement of maintaining origami rigidity is nontrivial. We propose a motion planner that takes symmetry into consideration and reuses folding folding path found on the essential crease pattern. Both of these strategies enable us to fold large origami tessellation much more efficiently than the existing methods. Our experimental results show that the proposed method successfully folds several types of rigid origami tessellations that the existing methods fail to fold.
Method
By taking advantage of symmetry in the crease pattern and use the proposed concept of essential vertex and essential crease pattern, we gather the crease lines into groups and assume all the crease lines in the same group have the same folding motion.
Left: 4x6 Waterbomb crease pattern. Right: 12x14 Waterbomb crease pattern. Crease lines in the same group are shown in the same color.
Folding motion found on the essential crease pattern can be reused to full crease pattern later.
Left: Folded state of 4x6 Waterbomb crease pattern. Right: Fold the 12x14 Waterbomb crease pattern into a tube by reusing the folding motion found on the 4x6 crease pattern.
Publication
Folding and Unfolding Origami Tessellation by Reusing Folding Path, Zhonghua Xi and Jyh-Ming Lien, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May. 2015
Web Site / Paper (pdf) / BibTeX
Web Site / Paper (pdf) / BibTeX
Folding and Unfolding Origami Tessellation by Reusing Folding Path, Zhonghua Xi and Jyh-Ming Lien, Department of Computer Science, George Mason University, (Technical Report), 2015
Web Site / Paper (pdf) / BibTeX
Web Site / Paper (pdf) / BibTeX
List of MASC Research Pages / List of MASC Origami Pages