A Methodology for Thick-Panel Origami Pattern Design

Rigid origami, especially rigid flat-foldable origami, is used to design compact structures with large fold-deploy ratios. However, the intersection between facets caused by material thickness can limit the applications of classical designs. In this paper, an approach for designing thick-panel origami structures is proposed in which facet thickness is explicitly considered. This approach can be used in general cases, not just limited to mirror symmetry patterns introduced in previous works, and keeps one degree of freedom. Origami patterns containing one or more of the three basic two-vertex patterns proposed in this paper can be handled by this approach. The key concept of this paper is to convert a flat-foldable pattern into a quasi-flat-foldable pattern, i.e., one that creates an almost-flat configuration with facets in parallel planes after folding, and to use the quasi-flat-foldable pattern to build thick panel structures while maintaining the motion features of the original pattern. The proposed approach can also be extended to origami tubes, which have been validated with several examples. The methodology presented in this paper will lead to the development of compact folded structures with many potential industrial applications.