Mechanism Design and Kinematic Analysis of a Novel Origami-Inspired Deployable Redundant Robotic Arm

This paper presents a novel high rigidity deployable redundant robotic arm based on origami mechanism, which can be used for hyper-redundant operation or as the fingers of robotic grasper. Firstly, the double-mobility deployable module using origami of non-zero thickness panels is designed, which is made up of two quadrilateral bases and two sets of triangular panels. All the panels are connected to each other by the revolute joints. Then the approach for avoiding physical interference of the non-zero thickness panels in origami is discussed. At the same time, the singular position avoidance of the robotic arm by using special geometry of the triangular panels is also introduced. Secondary, the kinematics, including mobility, forward and inverse equation, and workspace are analyzed, which shows that the redundant robotic arm can deployed from a compact folded configuration into a large volume deployed configuration and thus has adequate mobility for conducting the hyper-redundant operation. Thirdly, the potential applications are illustrated and computer-aided models are used to show the feasibility of the origami-inspired deployable redundant robotic arm.