Self-organising origami robot unfolds itself… and walks - tech - 07 August 2014 - New Scientist

Self-organising origami robot unfolds itself… and walks - tech - 07 August 2014 - New Scientist

New 3D, origami-like structures for soft robotics

New 3D, origami-like structures for soft robotics: The toy inspired the engineers to create the “buckliball,” a hollow, spherical object made of soft rubber containing no moving parts, but fashioned with 24 carefully spaced dimples. When the air is sucked out of a buckliball with a syringe, the thin ligaments forming columns between lateral dimples collapse.

This is the engineering equivalent of applying equal load on all beams in a structure simultaneously to induce buckling, a phenomenon first studied by mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1757.

When the buckliball’s thin ligaments buckle, the thicker ligaments forming rows between dimples undergo a series of movements the researchers refer to as a “cooperative buckling cascade.” Some of the thick ligaments rotate clockwise, others counterclockwise — but all move simultaneously and harmoniously, turning the original circular dimples into vertical and horizontal ellipses in alternating patterns before closing them entirely. As a result, the buckliball morphs into a rhombicuboctahedron about half the size (46 percent) of the original sphere.

Pulse of light creates instant origami

Pulse of light creates instant origami: Watch a self-folding material produce a range of 3D shapes when subjected to heat.

DNA Origami Revolutionizes Metamaterial Manufacture - Technology Review

DNA Origami Revolutionizes Metamaterial Manufacture - Technology Review: The idea here is to cover gold nanoparticles with short strands of single strand DNA. At the same time, the complement of this strand is built into a bigger DNA structure called a scaffold. When the nanoparticles are placed in solution with the DNA scaffold, the complementary DNA strands bond together, attaching the nanoparticles to the scaffold...
Kuzyk and co have used this process to bind nine gold nanoparticles just 10nm across to strands of DNA, forming a helical shape. So the particles form the steps in a tiny spiral staircase...
The result is a fluid that takes on the optical properties of the helical nanoparticle structures. Any circularly polarised light travelling through the spiral will excite electronic waves called plasmons on the surface of the gold nanoparticles.

Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Origami Crease Pattern Design Proved NP-Hard

Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Origami Crease Pattern Design Proved NP-Hard: "The experts in this field have long suspected the process of turning a stick figure into a crease pattern is computationally intractable. Now Lang and co prove that this intuition is correct by showing that the process is NP-hard. So it is much harder to devise a crease pattern that produces a spider than it is to check that a given solution is correct (ie by folding it into a spider).

They've done this using the standard trick of showing that the problem of origami is equivalent to another problem that is already known to be NP-hard, in this case the problem of packing circles into a given space."

Shape-shifting robots

Shape-shifting robots: "One of Demaine’s research areas is the mathematics of origami, and he and Rus hatched the idea of a flat sheet of material with tiny robotic muscles, or actuators, which could fold itself into useful objects. In principle, flat sheets with flat actuators should be much easier to fabricate than three-dimensional robots with enough intelligence that they can locate and attach to each other."