Shape and Motion Inverse Design of an Origami-Based Deployable Structure for Architectural Applications

Origami-based structures have been widely implemented in the design of deployable systems. They possess desirable properties such as easiness in manufacturing, high transportability, programmability, and the capability to fold into complex three-dimensional (3D) structures starting from planar configurations. However, their geometric complexity poses major challenges in developing efficient design methods, in which optimizing their geometries and folding motions remains a challenging task. This paper investigates the motion and shape inverse design of a Miura-based origami deployable system for architectural applications. The proposed structure folds from a flat to different 3D shapes, has 1 degree of freedom, and can fold rigidly being also flat foldable. The capabilities of the structure to fold approximating symmetrical target shapes of different geometries and achieve tailored folding motions are investigated. Furthermore, an inverse computational design workflow is proposed. The structure showed good accuracy in approximating target shapes, folding within desired motion envelopes, and avoiding collisions with surrounding objects. The origami-based system could be designed to deploy in different scenarios at the architectural scale, and could find applications as deployable canopy for improving comfort in outdoor conditions. Although limited to early design stages, the proposed design workflow is a flexible tool that could be applied to shape and motion inverse design tasks by simply variating its objective function. The method could be further applied to different typologies of rigid-foldable origami-based structures at different scales.

Current studies on origami-based deployable systems mainly cover geometries that can be deployed, function as static systems, and further folded after the end of their operation. Despite possessing desirable characteristics, such designs fail to take advantage of origami properties such as programmability and dynamic adaptability to different scenarios. In addition, the optimization of such structures and the conception of efficient design workflows remain challenging. This paper proposes a design that could be folded and unfolded dynamically adapting to its environment. Furthermore, a computational design workflow for the design of shape and motion is presented. The novel aspects of the study can be summarized as follows: (1) tailored design of complex 3D geometries using two-dimensional (2D) origami patterns, (2) design of both shape and motion, which extends the common only-shape design approach, (3) development of an efficient and flexible computational design workflow that could be adapted to diverse inverse design tasks with different objectives, and (4) development of the workflow in the Grasshopper interface, in which environmental simulations could be carried out. Thermal comfort, wind comfort, and acoustics are some of the topics of interest that could be evaluated without making any change in the proposed parameterization and optimization framework.