An Origami-Inspired Flexible Pneumatic Actuator

This paper presents a new actuator designed to produce forces under short stroke displacements. Two variants of the prototype have been manufactured using Multi-Material Additive Manufacturing process, based on a flexible origami-inspired architecture. The structure consists of an airtight chamber constituted by rigid plates combined with flexible hinges and surfaces in order to allow the generation of motion. We propose several insights on integration issues such as limited material resistance and maximum range of motion. Both versions of the prototype are then tested to assess their performances for single strokes and cyclic loading.