Rigid-Foldable Mechanism Inspired by Origami Twisted Tower

Rigid origami mechanisms have great practical utility in different fields. This paper presents a rigid and foldable mechanism based on the origami artwork Twisted Tower. The mathematical model of the funnel-shaped tower cell was developed for the first time, which accurately describes its kinematic behavior. Based on this model, criteria for the appropriate geometry of the tower components are proposed to prevent internal interference in the tower mechanism during the twisting movement. In this paper, two geometric design cases of twisted tower mechanisms, including a normal-shaped tower and a heteromorphic tower, are presented. Several additional modifications were also imposed to adapt the proposed mechanism to generalized and standardized manufacturing and assembly. Experimental results illustrate that the kinematic characteristics of the fabricated mechanism meet its designed performance. Furthermore, the proposed mechanism is suitable for applications such as continuum manipulators, which exhibit much better resistance to external loads than their flexible-rigid hybrid counterparts.