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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.
they can't patent this since prior art exists. The Bender unit far exceeds capabilities of the folding unit.
It's very cool too see something like that.I work with a "Robot" like that evryday.It apears that evry movement of the machine has to be programmed in on each axis.In a way this is more advanced than the router I work on with only has 3 axis's.Do a goole search on CNC machines and you will see some interesting stuff that work like this robot.
Excellent!.. I can use it to see the hidden joke on the back page of Mad magazine!
..........FULL STOP.
In the strictest rules of Origami, all folds must be done by hand. You cannot use any instrument to help you make a fold. So, there can only be psuedo-origami folding robots.