Origami folded into the engineering mix

Robots capable of transforming from one shape into another are being developed by researchers at MIT and Harvard, who have combined the ancient Japanese folk art of origami with modern day electrical engineering.

Researchers have developed a prototype robot – a sheet of semi-rigid glass-fibre and hydrocarbon material with a distinctive pattern of flexible creases, studded with magnets and electronic muscles or actuators – which can fold up into an origami boat or a paper aeroplane.

Professor Erik Demaine from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), had proved that a large enough sheet, creased in the box pleat pattern can be folded into a close approximation of any possible three dimensional shape upon receiving different electrical signals.

“You could imagine downloading the new iPhone,” said Demaine. “In the same way that you download the latest CD from your favourite artist totally electronically, you could imagine downloading shapes electronically and programming hardware in the same way you program software.”

The box pleat pattern divides the sheet into squares, each of which is divided diagonally across. Squares sharing an edge, their diagonal creases are mirror images.

Based on this Demaine, Daniela Rus - director of the Distributed Robotics Laboratory at CSAIL - and colleagues from Harvard developed complex algorithms that, given an arbitrary three dimensional shape, could generate a sequence of folds to produce the shape.

The robot so far has very limited use but has shown that the researchers’ approach to programmable material is viable.

The US Defence Department has a Programmable Matter project, which hopes to create small, uniform robots that could snap together like Lego to create larger, more versatile robots, but Rus says this has major drawbacks.

“Most people are looking at separate modules, and they’re really worried about how these modules aggregate themselves and find other modules to connect to create the shape that they supposed to,” she said, “Actively gathering modules to build up a shape bottom up, from scratch, is just really hard given the current state of the art in our hardware.”