Origami provides a unique tool for the design of robotic frames owing to its simple shaping principle by “folding.” However, achieving the fast and reversible activeness of a highly reconfigurable structure remains challenging owing to the limitations of accessible actuators. In particular, it is difficult to find an actuator that can realize a simultaneously large, rapid, reversible, and stable movement while leading to a favorable form factor for the origami. To overcome this, in this article, we propose a 3-D shape-shifting system consisting of a morphing origami block that complements the stability problem of shape memory alloy wire actuators by tuning its structural characteristics. This cooperative scheme improves the reversibility and stability of the shape-shifting system, which enables the rapid transformation with high degrees of freedom unlike in existing programmable origami. As a stand-alone unit of transformation, morphing block equipped with deployable mechanism and actuators weighs 6 g and has a volume change factor of ten. Furthermore, the transformation time in both directions is less than 5 s, and the block can carry more than 120 g of payload in the deployed state. The proposed system composed of multiple origami blocks can reconfigure itself into diverse 3-D target shapes.
Manuscript received January 27, 2020; revised June 18, 2020; accepted September 3, 2020. Date of publication November 11, 2020; date of current version April 2, 2021. This work was supported in part by the Korean Government through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) under Grant NRF-2016R1A5A1938472 and Grant NRF-2020M1A3B8084924, in part by the New Faculty Research Fund of Ajou University, and in part by the Ajou University Research Fund. This article was recommended for publication by Associate Editor J. Paik and Editor M. Yim upon evaluation of the reviewers\u2019 comments. (Sa-Reum Kim and Dae-Young Lee contributed equally to this work.) (Corresponding author: Kyu-Jin Cho).
