Inflatable Metamorphic Origami

Sen Wang; Peng Yan; Hailin Huang; Ning Zhang; Bing Li

doi:10.34133/research.0133

Inflatable Metamorphic Origami

Research (Wash D C). 2023 May 4:6:0133. doi: 10.34133/research.0133. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Sen Wang¹, Peng Yan¹, Hailin Huang^{1

2}, Ning Zhang¹, Bing Li^{1

2

3}

Affiliations

¹ School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen 518052, P.R. China.
² Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Intelligent Morphing Mechanisms and Adaptive Robotics, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen 518052, P. R. China.
³ State Key Laboratory of Robotics and System, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, P.R. China.

Abstract

This study created a new type of inflatable metamorphic origami that has the advantage of being a highly simplified deployable system capable of realizing multiple sequential motion patterns with a monolithic actuation. The main body of the proposed metamorphic origami unit was designed as a soft inflatable metamorphic origami chamber with multiple sets of contiguous/collinear creases. In response to pneumatic pressure, the metamorphic motions are characterized by an initial unfolding around the first set of contiguous/collinear creases followed by another unfolding around the second set of contiguous/collinear creases. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the proposed approach was verified by constructing a radial deployable metamorphic origami for supporting the deployable planar solar array, a circumferential deployable metamorphic origami for supporting the deployable curved-surface antenna, a multi-fingered deployable metamorphic origami grasper for grasping large-sized objects, and a leaf-shaped deployable metamorphic origami grasper for capturing heavy objects. The proposed novel metamorphic origami is expected to serve as a foundation for designing lightweight, high-deploy/fold-ratio, low-energy-consumption space deployable systems.