This is not the first time we have seen origami-inspired work, from innovative surgical instruments to expandable applications for engineering, antennas, and even folding robots. In this project, the researchers sought to program materials into a robotic system. This meant examining not only 3D printability but also foldability and the required mechanical properties. The art of origami is now being accepted as an intuitive and fertile inspiration for mechanical meta material design due to its foldability, deployability, flexibility, scale-free geometry as well as programmable reconfiguration, noting that previous research has yielded miniaturized robots, soft robots, ingestible robots for medical tasks, compliant modules, medical devices, grippers, and more.

This project applies a new class of parallel manipulators inspired by origami folds. This project investigates both position and geometry of these manipulators and identifies the closed form solutions for the inverse kinematics problem. We  will replace the linear actuator in the typical Stewart platform which is the robot in the right picture below with an Origami linear actuator and record the results for it during the project.

Soft robotic systems present a variety of new opportunities for solving complex problems. The use of soft robotic grippers, for example, can simplify the complexity in tasks such as the grasping of irregular and delicate objects. Adoption of soft robotics by the informatics community and industry, however, has been slow and this is, in-part, due to the amount of hardware and software that must be developed from scratch for each use of soft system components. 

When most people picture robots, they see machines with rigid parts. In this project the robots will be developed are soft, with parts made from deformable plastics and rubber. Soft robots are safer to operate around people and are ideally suited to carry out a variety of tasks that their traditionally rigid cousins can’t, including moving snake-like through confined spaces. But their ability to bend in many axes and change their shape make them unable to carry heavy loads, which limits their utility. So that a new class of variable-stiffness robots that have which have rigidity and softness. This innovative designs draw on the ancient art of paper folding, known as origami.