Origami Multistabilty: From Single Vertices to Metasheets

TL;DR

This paper investigates the energy landscape of origami-like structures, revealing multiple stable states in vertices and introducing a method to create multistable metasheets for advanced design.

Contribution

It characterizes the stability of degree-4 vertices and presents a procedure to tile these vertices into metasheets, enabling multistable origami designs.

Findings

Vertices can have up to five stable states.

Symmetric and collinear folds increase the number of stable states.

A method to tile vertices into metasheets preserves stability.

Abstract

We explore the surprisingly rich energy landscape of origami-like folding planar structures. We show that the configuration space of rigid-paneled degree-4 vertices, the simplest building blocks of such systems, consists of at least two distinct branches meeting at the flat state. This suggests that generic vertices are at least bistable, but we find that the nonlinear nature of these branches allows for vertices with as many as five distinct stable states. In vertices with collinear folds and/or symmetry, more branches emerge leading to up to six stable states. Finally, we introduce a procedure to tile arbitrary 4-vertices while preserving their stable states, thus allowing the design and creation of multistable origami metasheets.