Untethered control of functional origami microrobots with distributed actuation

By L. Novelino, Qiji Ze, Shuai Wu, Glaucio H. Paulino, Ruike Renee Zhao. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020

296 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Significance Over the past decade, origami has unfolded engineering applications leading to tunable, deployable, and multifunctional systems. Origami-inspired structures currently rely on the use of actuation methods that are pneumatic, mechanical, stimuli-responsive, etc. These actuation strategies commonly lead to bulky actuators, extra wiring, slow speed, or fail to provide a local and distributed actuation. In this work, we introduce a magnetically responsive origami system to expand its shape-changing capability for multifunctionality. We anticipate that the reported magnetic origami system is applicable beyond the bounds of this work, including robotics, morphing mechanisms, biomedical devices, and outer space structures. Deployability, multifunctionality, and tunability are features that can be explored in the design space of origami engineering solutions. These features arise from the shape-changing capabilities of origami assemblies, which require effective actuation for full functionality. Current actuation strategies rely on either slow or tethered or bulky actuators (or a combination). To broaden applications of origami designs, we introduce an origami system with magnetic control. We couple the geometrical and mechanical properties of the bistable Kresling pattern with a magnetically responsive material to achieve untethered and local/distributed actuation with controllable speed, which can be as fast as a tenth of a second with instantaneous shape locking. We show how this strategy facilitates multimodal actuation of the multicell assemblies, in which any unit cell can be independently folded and deployed, allowing for on-the-fly programmability. In addition, we demonstrate how the Kresling assembly can serve as a basis for tunable physical properties and for digital computing. The magnetic origami systems are applicable to origami-inspired robots, morphing structures and devices, metamaterials, and multifunctional devices with multiphysics responses.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Condensed Matter Physics, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9d030dce1d25f09bb04596ef34152b1dee36f3c1

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In Biomedical Engineering

  1. Mokarram Hossain
  2. A. Bastola

In Condensed Matter Physics

  1. Mokarram Hossain
  2. A. Bastola

In Mechanical Engineering

  1. Mokarram Hossain
  2. A. Bastola

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