08 Sep

Project goal: design toolbox An example design paradigm (Library #2) is shown below, with all edges simply-supported and distributed load across the entire top surface as an example. This week I have been searching existing methods/solutions for calculating reaction load on edges of a plat...

01 Sep

High-Level View: computational design of foldable structures Updates During the past week, I have been working on finidng numerical solutions for plate failures under different boundary conditions and loading conditions. For a plate, there are three types of boundary conditions: (1) simply...

25 Aug

During the past week, I have been doing background study on plate theory. The short term goal is to be able to determine plate behavior when applied loads. The long term goal is to be able to determine behavior of arbitrary foldable structures (which are assembled with plates), with different bounda...

19 Aug

Project High-Level View I propose the following as the high level view for designing foldable robots. ICRA Project Goal For the next two months, I will be focusing on designing structural elements, which is a major component in foldable robotic systems. I will build analysis design toolbox t...

13 Aug

Wenzhong and I have been working on the paper named Computational Design and Fabrication of Corrugated Mechanisms from Behavioral Specifications during the past week. We have submitted the paper and fingers crossed. Special thanks to Wenzhong for his suggestions and helps. Also thanks everyone...

06 Aug

Robot Car And Paper Preparation This week, I built two fully functional wheeled robot cars as a tool to demonstrate the functionality of the corrugated structure. Figures Introduction Wheeled robot car Demo Videos Robot car with flat-plane wheels Robot car with corrugated wheels R...

28 Jul

Update: I found a typo in the modeling I presented last week. I has been revised. The new model makes sense by looking at the trends. The model is validated at some extreme situations (e.g. then crease folding angle alpha=180deg). Out-of-plane bending is added to the analysis. So now we ha...

23 Jul

Using the analytical model developed last week, with certain geometry constraints, stiffness of the proposed orthogonally assembled double-layer corrugated structures have been evaluated. Using design parameters optimized from maximum stiffness requirements, a rectangular shape sample and a circular...

15 Jul

This week, I did quite a lot of literature review and a lot of math to convert the complicated model to a simple but really applicable version. The model can convert the corrugated sturcture to simple plates by redefining the equivalent material properties (Young's modulus mostly). Using this model,...

08 Jul

For the past few days, I have been studing the mechanical behaviors of accordion shape folded structures. I have also been studying the science of paper sheet, which is quite complicated. I have developed a mathematical model to predict the in-plane stiffness of both single-layered accordion shape f...