Uniformly Deployable Kirigami on Arbitrary Planar Graphs

Abstract

We present an analytical framework for exploring the design space of hinged kirigami structures that deploy rigidly and uniformly. A hinged kirigami structure consists of rigid planar faces connected by hinges, and is deployable if the faces can rotate about the hinges without deformation. Such deployability depends on both the topology and the geometry, i.e., the combinatorial connectivity of the faces and their spatial embedding. Prior work studies geometric constraints for uniform deployability in restricted settings, most notably quadrilateral kirigami patterns and structures derived from 2-colorable planar graphs. However, existing analysis does not readily generalize to arbitrary kirigami structures, nor does it provide a systematic approach for constructing deployable kirigami from non-2-colorable planar graphs (e.g., graphs with non-manifold embeddings). Moreover, while geometric conditions for deployability have been partially investigated, the structure of the full deployable design space and its associated degrees of freedom remain largely unexplored. In this work, we propose a new framework that enables the derivation of hinged kirigami structures from arbitrary planar graphs, with the key feature that multiple distinct kirigami structures can be generated from the same graph. We derive geometric constraints that ensure uniform rigid deployability and analytically characterize the full design space of deployable embeddings, including its associated degrees of freedom. This characterization allows continuous navigation of the design space and provides a systematic foundation for the design of kirigami-based mechanical metamaterials.