Toward the Design of Kresling Tower Origami As a Compliant Building Block

In this paper, the use of the Kresling tower origami as a building block for compliant mechanism design is considered. To help building systems using this origami, models are derived to link the origami pattern geometry to the Kresling tower characteristics. This includes the position of stable configurations, the helical trajectory describing the motion and the orientation of panels during the tower deployment. The provided analytical expressions are helpful to adjust the tower geometry according to desired specification. In addition, an original modification of fold geometry is introduced to modify the tower stiffness. Material removal at specific locations, where maximum fold deformations occur, aims at reducing the actuation force without affecting the kinematics. Experimental evaluation is conducted to assess the relevance of the proposed models and evaluate the impact of fold line modification. The proposed simplified models are precise enough for the synthesis. The capacity to strongly reduce the actuation force, due to the fold line modification, is observed.