Design and analysis of foldable structures inspired by the origami

ObjectiveThe origami mechanism born from combining the ancient art of paper folding with the modern mechanism is widely used in the field of space structure, and its unique spreadability, convenience, light weight and miniaturisation have been the hot direction of research. A series of three dimensional foldable structure designs based on the spherical 4R linkage was proposed.MethodsFirstly, based on the traditional spherical 4R linkage, the topological structure was extracted, and then the mountain fold and valley fold were allocated according to the plane folding law to find the folding mode that met the structure. Secondly, the superposition effect of the topological structure was equivalent to the superposition of folding mode, and a series of folding paper models could be obtained after the aggregation. Then, one of the models was designed as an example, and the D-H parameters were used for kinematic modeling. Finally, the kinematics equation was numerically solved and analyzed.ResultsIt provides important research ideas and reference for the study of foldable structures.