Design of a Novel Mutliple-DOF Extendable Arm With Rigid Components Inspired by a Deployable Origami Structure

An extendable robot inspired by origami is designed, analyzed, and tested. Its deployable origami structure has a large extension ratio, allowing the robot to extend the body length multiple times. The new robot, however, differs from the existing origami structure in two aspects. One is that the robot mechanism consists of all rigid bodies, unlike the prior origami that exploits structural deformation for creating flexible configurations. The other is that new origami-inspired robot has multiple active degrees of freedom, allowing for taking various postures, unlike most deployable mechanisms composed of rigid components having a single DOF. When developing a mechanism based on an origami structure, we often encounter the deformations of parts during the transition from the contracted to the extended configurations. Previously, we analyzed the motion of a deployable origami structure considering the foldings' deformation and showed that they do not have any kinematic roles but give a large effect to constrain the motion. Thus, we come to the idea that by removing such parts, a novel rigid extendable mechanism with multiple DOF can be obtained, which can achieve a large extension ratio and a high transformability only by its kinematic structure, beyond an original origami structure.