Leveraging Origami Mechanisms for Enhanced Manipulation: Design and Modeling of an Extensible Robotic Arm

Abstract Conventional robotic arms are primarily designed for bending deformation at a constant length, which limits their ability to meet operational requirements that involve extending and manipulating within complex environments, such as deep cavities and obstacle-cluttered spaces. To address this limitation, this study proposes an origami-inspired extensible robotic arm. The robotic arm consists of a series of origami units arranged along a central axis and is driven by cables. It exhibits coupled elongation–bending deformation, offering advantages such as lightweight construction, a large extension-to-contraction ratio, and compact storability. However, the origami-inspired extensible arm has been hindered by multiscale simulation challenges spanning two orders of magnitude in spatial dimensions and four in temporal dimensions, where traditional contact-based methods suffer from excessive computational costs. To overcome these limitations, this work establishes a modeling methodology tailored for origami-based extensible robotic arms, taking into account key factors such as contact between origami panels and the time-varying length of the driving cables. A full-scale simulation model is developed, revealing the mechanism of coupled extension–bending deformation of the origami structure and extracting the mechanical responses under differently activated driving cables. This model provides a technical foundation for operational performance evaluation and enables rapid validation of various control strategies, thereby enhancing the transferability from simulation to practical applications for origami-based extensible robotic arms.