Automating Rigid Origami Design

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel optimization-based approach for designing diverse and functional rigid origami crease patterns, moving beyond traditional tessellation methods to enable application-specific and innovative origami designs.

Contribution

It formulates rigid origami design as a discrete optimization problem, allowing flexible objectives and expanding the diversity of feasible crease patterns.

Findings

Able to generate patterns approximating target shapes

Designed foldable, functional objects with abstract rewards

Demonstrated flexibility with various search methods

Abstract

Rigid origami has shown potential in large diversity of practical applications. However, current rigid origami crease pattern design mostly relies on known tessellations. This strongly limits the diversity and novelty of patterns that can be created. In this work, we build upon the recently developed principle of three units method to formulate rigid origami design as a discrete optimization problem, the rigid origami game. Our implementation allows for a simple definition of diverse objectives and thereby expands the potential of rigid origami further to optimized, application-specific crease patterns. We showcase the flexibility of our formulation through use of a diverse set of search methods in several illustrative case studies. We are not only able to construct various patterns that approximate given target shapes, but to also specify abstract, function-based rewards which result in novel, foldable and functional designs for everyday objects.