Origami technique puts new twist on engineered structures

The team, made up of researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Tokyo, say the method could be applied to other thin materials, including plastic or metal, to transform structures from furniture to buildings to microscopic robots.

Illinois graduate researcher Evgueni Filipov, Georgia Tech professor Glaucio Paulino and University of Tokyo professor Tomohiro Tachi published their work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Paulino sees particular potential for quick-assembling emergency shelters, bridges and other infrastructure in the wake of a natural disaster.

“Origami became more of an objective for engineering and a science just in the last five years or so,” Filipov said in a statement. “A lot of it was driven by space exploration, to be able to launch structures compactly and deploy them in space. But we’re starting to see how it has potential for a lot of different fields of engineering. You could prefabricate something in a factory, ship it compactly and deploy it on site.”