Preliminary Design and Performance Test of an Origami Actuator Inspired by Yoshimura Pattern

Origami has been inspiring roboticists to create new devices. Here, we present a preliminary design and performance test of a novel origami actuator inspired by Yoshimura pattern. This actuator is in a hexagonal configuration made of a single piece of paper. Driven by the threads, the origami actuator can bend and shorten. The design of its folding pattern is presented, and the folding procedure is also formulated. The folding pattern and paper properties contribute to the performance of the actuator. Particularly, the grammage, standing for the area density of paper as a metric to classify the paper, draws our attention. We develop a test setup to examine the impact of the grammage on the elastic property of the actuator. We found that although there was a hysteresis effect during the deformation, the origami actuator exhibited the linear elastic properties over a certain range of shortening.