Design and Analysis of Yoshimura Tubular Origami Mechanisms

The Yoshimura tubular origami mechanism possesses numerous advantageous properties and, when integrated with advanced material technologies, can be applied across various engineering disciplines. However, current research on Yoshimura origami predominantly focuses on centrally symmetric tubular origami mechanisms, which restricts the structural forms and motion patterns of these mechanisms. Drawing inspiration from the biological concept of “morphological variation,” we propose a novel tubular origami mechanism based on the Yoshimura pattern, which is the main contribution of this research. We analyze the Yoshimura planar crease elements and introduce both heterocellular and homocellular tubular origami mechanisms. Furthermore, we establish the origami topology matrices for the Yoshimura tubular origami mechanisms. This research also investigates complex motion forms that differ from traditional Yoshimura origami mechanisms, including macroscopic twisting and compound movements, thereby providing an intuitive design approach and extensive structural guidance for research in Yoshimura tubular origami engineering. Based on the tubular origami mechanism, we created an origami robot and investigate its motion characteristics.