The World's First Origami Folding Robot

Roland Piquepaille writes "Devin Balkcom, a Carnegie Mellon graduate student in robotics, has built the world's first origami-folding robot as the subject of his thesis. Origami, the geometry of paper folding, looks simple when you're a kid. But it's actually quite challenging to design a robot to do it. Movements are quite complex, and paper, because it is flexible, is difficult to be manipulated by a robot. This news release says that the project uses kinematics, the study of mechanisms, to determine how folding is done and how paper can be treated as a flexible and rigid material. You'll find more details and references in this overview, including some frames extracted from videos showing the robot at work." Balkcom's website has movies, information and a couple of academic papers.

Comments

Darn

[iminplaya]

I thought the robot folded itself, like the Jetsons car.

milk cartons...

[uncadonna]

so all those cartons and intricately folded packing materials I've been seeing all my life have been hand-folded?

What about pop-up books?

This is a nice student project, but I don't see that there's anything unprecedented here.