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

It's cool...

[Bull999999]

But not as cool as the self chilling keg.

Mislead by the title...

[antdude]

I thought this was about a robot that could be transformed/folded like an orgami. Hmmph.

Re:But is there a robot...

[stephenisu]

I would love to put an AOL CD in this machine.