Abstract
The origami horn is a rigidly foldable tubular origami model designed to match the shape of an arbitrary curve. While it has potential for engineering applications, the origami horn comes with its drawbacks. It has no self-locking design, and the model might collide with itself as it folds. This paper discusses the construction of two origami tessellations designed to match the shape of a given non-intersecting planar curve. These are the modular origami horn chain, MOHC, and the modular origami claw chain, MOCC. Both origami tessellations solve the issues found in the origami horn. The MOHC is a concatenation of horn units, and the MOCC is a concatenation of claw units. Both units are flat-foldable and rigidly foldable. An algorithm is proposed to convert any non-intersecting planar curve to either the MOHC or MOCC. Both origami tessellations possess a property allowing copies of them to stack and form rigidly foldable stacked structures. MOHCs and MOCCs are also classified into families, in which two origami tessellations in the same family can stack to form self-locking stacked structures. Each stacked structure folds with one DOF, enabling it to deploy with simple controls. Paper prototypes are constructed to demonstrate that the models deploy as designed. Furthermore, the origami tessellations presented here can be used to create origami robot arms and snake-like deployable structures.
