The traditional origami is normally made of thin and flexible paper, but when it is transformed into engineering applications, rigid origami is considered in which the facets of the crease patterns are typically rigid panels that rotate around predetermined folds (which become complaint hinges) without any tension-bend deformation during the continuous folding process. In the past two decades, interest in folded structures and mechanisms has increased dramatically, and origami-inspired structures and mechanisms have founded applications in wide areas including, to mention but a few, aerospace mechanisms and devices, robotics, medical devices, mechanical metamaterials, energy absorption structures, and MEMS devices. The proposed technique can be extended to the design and construction of thick-panel polyhedrons with potential applications in the fields such as aerospace exploration, robotics and architecture. In addition, a prototype of the proposed thick-panel origami cube is fabricated, verifying its kinematic properties. Through mechanism decomposition, geometric constraints and kinematic properties of the corresponding integrated mechanism are investigated and formulated, which reveals the kinematic equivalence between the thick-panel and zero-thickness forms of the origami cube. Then, by utilizing the proposed thick-panel vertex, a thick-panel cube is constructed based on the zero-thickness origami cube that was proposed in our previous work. The proposed thick-panel vertex preserves the kinematics of the original four-crease origami vertex. By replacing the equivalent 4 R -spherical linkage in a four-crease zero-thickness origami vertex with a plane-symmetric Bricard linkage, the thick-panel form of a general plane-symmetric four-crease origami vertex is identified and constructed. This paper presents a new method for constructing a novel thick-panel origami cube.

Origami cube