Design and Fabrication of String-driven Origami Robots

The paper addresses a practical bottleneck in origami robotics: creating crease patterns and fabricating origami structures often depends on expert human skill and takes time. The authors propose a rapid method that combines an origami design software with analytical models and Evolution Strategies to generate crease patterns and automatically produce 3D models. They then fabricate wrapping-based origami structures with a dual-material 3D printer to achieve required mechanical properties. For actuation, the work uses Twisted String Actuators (TSAs) to fold target 3D origami shapes from flat plates. To show the approach works, the authors built and tested an origami crawling robot and an origami robotic arm driven by TSAs.