A review of curved crease origami: design, analysis, and applications

Abstract

Origami structures with morphing behaviours and unique mechanical properties are useful in aerospace deployable structures, soft robots and mechanical metamaterials. Curved-crease origami, as one of the variants in the origami family, has a curve that connects two vertices as a crease compared to the straight crease counterpart. This feature couples the crease folding and facet bending during the folding process, providing versatile design space of mechanical metamaterials with tunable stiffness, multi-stability properties and morphing behaviours. However, current design techniques are mostly for simple geometries with intuitive construction, the modelling technique focuses on using the conventional finite element method, and the intrinsically complex geometries make specimens difficult to manufacture, which further hinders the development of curved-crease origami structures. Thus, it is valuable to review the state-of-the-art in curved-crease origami. This paper presents a review on the design methodology, analytical methods, and applications of curved-crease origami over the years, discusses their strengths, identifies future challenges and provides an outlook for the future development of the curved-crease origami concept.