Rigiccordion Worm - A Linear Two-DOF Origami Robot

Abstract Origami robots offer great potential due to their compliant nature, relative ease of manufacturing, lightweight, and safety. They are considered in areas like collaborative robotics, space applications, navigation of a variety of terrains, and search and rescue. This paper focuses on robotic applications like the latter, in which an origami robot is desired to be small in size, lightweight, fast, simple to model, produce, and control. As such, the body of an origami robot — the origami structural spring — should be simple to fold and model. One way to achieve both of these properties is to use a simple origami pattern that is rigidly foldable. In this work, a two-degrees-of-freedom (two-DoF) worm robot is presented. The worm body is constructed from a simple rigidly deformable origami pattern, named ‘rigiccordion’, which exhibits linear response properties, as well as 3d printed rigid parts. The structure stiffness is experimentally attained for two different types of material (inkjet paper and Mylar). The procedure to laser cut the origami fold pattern for a Mylar sheet is presented. Finally, the two-DoF worm robot is designed and tested using the rigiccordion structure for compliance and energy storage. The results show that the two-DoF robot can move horizontally with a speed of up to 1.56 cm/s (0.12 body length/s) and turn at a rate of 1.8°/s.