A three-dimensional actuated origami-inspired transformable metamaterial with multiple degrees of freedom
By Johannes T. B. Overvelde, Twan A. de Jong, Y. Shevchenko, S. A. Becerra, George M. Whitesides, J. Weaver, C. Hoberman, Katia Bertoldi. Nature Communications, 2016
423 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Reconfigurable devices, whose shape can be drastically altered, are central to expandable shelters, deployable space structures, reversible encapsulation systems and medical tools and robots. All these applications require structures whose shape can be actively controlled, both for deployment and to conform to the surrounding environment. While most current reconfigurable designs are application specific, here we present a mechanical metamaterial with tunable shape, volume and stiffness. Our approach exploits a simple modular origami-like design consisting of rigid faces and hinges, which are connected to form a periodic structure consisting of extruded cubes. We show both analytically and experimentally that the transformable metamaterial has three degrees of freedom, which can be actively deformed into numerous specific shapes through embedded actuation. The proposed metamaterial can be used to realize transformable structures with arbitrary architectures, highlighting a robust strategy for the design of reconfigurable devices over a wide range of length scales. Typically, most structures and devices that can be reconfigured are designed with application specific requirements. Inspired by modular origami ideas, Overveldeet al. present a mechanical metamaterial enabling the design of three-dimensional structures of arbitrary architecture with tunable shape, volume and stiffness.
Subfields: Civil and Structural Engineering, Mechanical Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/34d6172a0721a3e5062ab59898a196cbee70ff0f
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Citations in the corpus
- Origami-inspired, on-demand deployable and collapsible mechanical metamaterials with tunable stiffness (2018, background): “Various type of automatic actuations, including pneumatic force (7, 23), heat (24–28), light (29–32), swelling (29, 33), and magnetic forces (34, 35), can be considered in the future to develop responsive, self-deploy/collapse, and stiff metamaterials.”
- Design, fabrication and control of origami robots (2018, neutral): “Panel p is reproduced with permission from ReF.63, IOP Publishing.”
- Mechanical metamaterials associated with stiffness, rigidity and compressibility: a brief review (2017, background): “[201] extended snapology to cellular origami metamaterials.”
- Rational design of reconfigurable prismatic architected materials (2017, methodology): “taking inspiration from snapology(24,25) - a modular origami technique - a highly reconfigurable 3D metamaterial assembled from extruded cubes has been designed.(26) Although these examples showcase the potential of origami-inspired designs to enable reconfigurable architected materials, they do not”
- Reconfigurable origami-inspired acoustic waveguides (2016, methodology): “If we assume that all the faces are rigid and the structure can only fold along the edges, this periodic structure will have three degrees of freedom identified by the angles α1, α2, and α3 [17].”
- Fluid-driven origami-inspired artificial muscles (2017, background): “This technique allows us to quickly program, fabricate, and implement actuation systems for very specific working environments at multiple scales, such as active metamaterials (44), miniature surgical devices (45, 46), wearable robotic exoskeletons (47), transformable architecture, as well as deep-s”