Design of an extendable robot arm based on origami foldpatterns

Recently, the trend to use robots to support household tasks has increased significantly. So far, these robots are primarily entrusted with fixed tasks, for example, vacuum cleaning or mowing, and operate with few degrees of freedom. In order to be able to take over even more household tasks in the future, a length-Adjustable robotic arm is presented in the following. The unique feature of this robot arm is that it is origami-based, which makes the activating structure and the guiding structure the same. In addition, the fold-based approach offers the advantages of origami-based engineering: Due to the high number of kinematic constraints created by repeating fold-schemes, a very high stiffness can be achieved. In addition, the facet-based design of folding mechanisms structures allows the integration of sandwich-structured lightweight panels, which significantly reduces the weight of these structures. The construction of this arm was made possible by the Matlab toolbox SG-Libary [1]. This design process is automated and adaptable to the users requirements regarding the desired retracted, respectively extended length of the robot arm. With the process shown in this paper, a robotic arm was created and manufactured using SLS 3D printing. The robotic arm was then tested for deformation with and without external load using an optical tracking method.