Additive design of 2-dimensional scissor lattices

TL;DR

This paper presents an additive design method for creating transformable 2D scissor lattice structures, inspired by linkage mechanisms, origami, and kirigami, enabling the design of surfaces with complex curvature.

Contribution

It introduces a complete algorithm for designing and exploring the full space of karigami structures, bridging linkage mechanisms with origami and kirigami.

Findings

Successfully designed and physically realized complex karigami structures.

Algorithm explores the entire mechanism space for 2D lattice designs.

Structures can unfold from 1D to 2D with single and double curvature.

Abstract

We introduce an additive approach for the design of a class of transformable structures based on two-bar linkages ("scissor mechanisms") joined at vertices to form a two dimensional lattice. Our discussion traces an underlying mathematical similarity between linkage mechanisms, origami, and kirigami and inspires our name for these structures: karigami. We show how to design karigami which unfold from a one dimensional collapsed state to two-dimensional surfaces of single and double curvature. Our algorithm for growing karigami structures is provably complete in providing the ability to explore the full space of possible mechanisms, and we use it to computationally design and physically realize a series of examples of varying complexity.