Related papers: Rapid design of fully soft deployable structures v…
Mechanical waves that travel without inertia are often encountered in nature -- e.g. motion of plants -- yet such waves remain rare in synthetic materials. Here, we discover the emergence of slow kinks in overdamped metamaterials and we…
In recent years, the concept of kirigami has been used in creating deployable structures for various scientific and technological applications. While high-fidelity Finite Element Analysis (FEA) is the standard for analyzing stress…
Thin sheets can be assembled into tubular origami structures that combine deployability with pronounced anisotropic stiffness, enabling applications ranging from robotics to deployable systems. However, most existing tubular origami designs…
Designing a robot or structure that can fold itself into a target shape is a process that involves challenges originated from multiple sources. For example, the designer of rigid self-folding robots must consider foldability from geometric…
Rigidly and flat-foldable quadrilateral mesh origami is the class of quadrilateral mesh crease patterns with one fundamental property: the patterns can be folded from flat to fully-folded flat by a continuous one-parameter family of…
A long-standing challenge in impact mitigation is the development of versatile and omnifarious protective structures capable of encompassing a wide spectrum of scenarios, for example, ranging from low-speed pedestrian impacts to high-speed…
This work harnesses interpretable machine learning methods to address the challenging inverse design problem of origami-inspired systems. We show that a decision tree-random forest method is particularly suitable for fitting origami…
Flexible robotics are capable of achieving various functionalities by shape morphing, benefiting from their compliant bodies and reconfigurable structures. Here we construct and study a class of origami springs generalized from the known…
Kirigami offers unique opportunities for guided morphing by leveraging the geometry of the cuts. This work presents inflatable kirigami crawlers created by introducing cut patterns into heat-sealable textiles to achieve locomotion upon…
Colloidal self-assembly -- the spontaneous organization of colloids into ordered structures -- has been considered key to produce next-generation materials. However, the present-day staggering variety of colloidal building blocks and the…
Kirigami metamaterial sheets and tubes, owing to their capacity to undergo large elastic deformations while developing three-dimensional surface textures, have enormous potential as skins for soft robots. Here, we propose to use kirigami…
Mechanical and phononic metamaterials exhibiting negative elastic moduli, gapped vibrational spectra, or topologically protected modes enable precise control of structural and acoustic functionalities. While much progress has been made in…
We present an approach to overcoming challenges in dynamical dexterity for robots through tunable origami structures. Our work leverages a one-parameter family of flat sheet crease patterns that folds into origami bellows, whose axial…
Prototyping compact devices with unique form factors often requires the PCB manufacturing process to be outsourced, which can be expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we present Fibercuit, a set of rapid prototyping techniques to…
We propose an algorithmic framework of a pluripotent structure evolving from a simple compact structure into diverse complex 3-D structures for designing the shape transformable, reconfigurable, and deployable structures and robots. Our…
The ability to transform a flat sheet into a complex three-dimensional structure is a fundamental test of physical intelligence. Unlike cloth manipulation, origami is governed by strict geometric axioms and hard kinematic constraints, where…
Ring origami, consisting of closed-loop rods, is a class of shape-morphing structures that undergo shape transformation through folding enabled by snap-buckling instabilities, referred to as snap-folding instabilities. Previous studies have…
Sim-to-real transfer remains a significant challenge in soft robotics due to the unpredictability introduced by common manufacturing processes such as 3D printing and molding. These processes often result in deviations from simulated…
Kirigami-inspired designs can enable self-folding three-dimensional materials from flat, two-dimensional sheets. Hierarchical designs of connected levels increase the diversity of possible target structures, yet they can lead to longer…
As soft robot design matures, researchers have converged to sophisticated design paradigms to enable the development of more suitable platforms. Two such paradigms are soft-rigid hybrid robots, which utilize rigid structural materials in…