Engineering with Origami

engineers are turning to origami for inspiration for all types of applications from medical devices to space applications and even stopping bullets but why is it that this ancient art of paper folding is so useful for modern engineering origami literally folding paper dates back at least 400 years in japan but the number of designs was limited there were only a handful of patterns maybe 100 200 total in japan nowadays there are tens of thousands that have been documented and most of that change happened in the 20th century there were a handful of japanese origami masters and by far the most successful of them was a man named akira yoshizawa who created thousands of new designs wrote many many books of his works and his work inspired a worldwide renaissance of origami creativity well i wanted to fold a cactus the first thing one needed to do is figure out how do i get spines on a cactus so you can imagine if i can make two spines here i could do the same thing to make a whole row then i can go back do a complete design that's what this is [Laughter] and and this is actually the cactus and the pot are from a single sheet of paper the paper's green on one side red on the other that whole thing is this thing so this is this is one uncut square of paper how big was that piece of paper and this is about a one meter square so there is a huge amount of size reduction to go from a meter down to here but you need that to get all of the spines and how long did that take to make that took about seven years from start to finish wow why is origami this thing that was created for aesthetics mainly why is it so useful i guess is the question for for like you know structural things that were for mechanical engineering or for space applications like why does it find itself in so many of these applications why is it so useful well the thing that makes origami useful is it is a way of transforming a flat sheet into some other shape with relatively little processing this is a folded pattern it's called a triangulated cylinder it is by stable meaning it's stable in two positions this is one and then if i give it a twist this is the other this really has a bunch of bi-stable mechanisms in it because i can you can see how it sort of pops into place but if you combine the two mechanisms going in different directions then you get the sort of magical color change effect yeah that's impressive so you look at this and you say okay that is a cute paper toy is it anything more than that and the answer is yes does that turn into that turns into that yep we're working with a company called two against surgical that does the da vinci surgical robot where they wanted to be able to insert a flexible catheter with uh with the robot but the flexible catheters tend to buckle and stuff so we had developed these origami bellows that if you look down there there's uh a hole that no matter how far we move this that that stays the same size on the inside and what that means is we can put the catheter in there and as the catheter moves and it's getting inserted into the body it still has supports along the way or for another example here i have a foldable bulletproof collapsible wall it's based on the yoshimura crease pattern meanings might make this out of a bulletproof material can be very compact being a police officer's car and deploy out and be bulletproof but would it actually work well they've put it to the test using 12 layers of kevlar it can stop bullets from a handgun and a new design featuring interchangeable panels should be able to stop rifle rounds those and that vial that is those are actually bullets that have been stopped by origami an intrinsic benefit of origami is that the simple act of folding a material can make it more rigid i was going to ask you about this yeah more origami but i was going to say it's a way of making the can stronger without actually like thinner metal right but for engineering applications the more common challenge is how to fold thick rigid materials this is uh polypropylene okay very rigid there's no way that i'm going to be able to to fold that into this vertex so this is an example it shows a couple things surrogate folds we can use to replace the the creases and then also that piece of polypropylene folds up and it also accommodates the thickness by cutting or scoring materials and adding hinges as necessary thick rigid materials can in effect be folded this is useful for example in deploying solar panels this pattern is perhaps the granddaddy of deployable structures it's called the miura ori it's been used for solar arrays in fact it was one of the first patterns that flew on a space mission back in 1995 it was called the space flyer mission as you see here it all opens and closes in a single motion and when it flattens it's it's very thin and compact it's a fun pattern called the origami flasher and you get this kind of interesting flasher motion this has been proposed as a design for satellite solar arrays increasing compactness for launch and reliability in deployment [Music] a new area for origami research is in improving the aerodynamics of freight locomotives the thing with freight locomotives is you know they're just like bricks going down the tracks so their aerodynamics are horrible ideally i'd like to have a nose cone on the front of a freight locomotive to improve the aerodynamics but you can't because they're like lego blocks they're hooked up anywhere along the train you don't know if it's the first one or the second one or the third one here's a scaled prototype showing a pattern that we demonstrated on a freight locomotive it folds up to be very flat but then deploys out and it turns out our computer models and wind tunnel testing show that this will save this one company multiple millions of dollars a year in diesel this is a violinist it was one of my favorite mechanism designs because he fiddles if you pull his head fantastic functional motions of origami are inspiring new designs for devices like compliant mechanisms that can complete full 360 degree rotations unlike a traditional mechanisms with you know bearings or hinges i can hook on a motor and i can get continuous revolution i couldn't do that with a compliant mechanism but it turns out no one bothered to tell the paper folders that and created a uh continuously revolving compliant mechanism which is called a kalita cycle origami motions are also being used in medical devices these would be you know the creases in the paper uh and we have here now uh forceps and so what's nice about this is we could put this at a smaller scale right on the medical instrument to go into the body but then can morph and become the gripper so it'll be very small incision but then go in and do some more complex tasks inside the body a variant of this mini gripper is now being used in robotic surgeries replacing the previous mechanism and reducing the number of parts by 75 percent the origami inspired device is smaller but with a wider range of motion and functional origami can be miniaturized even further this is the world's smallest origami flapping bird that sounds cool this one was devoted to developing techniques to make microscopic self-folding origami and what you see here is a microscope photo of the finished bird but what the bird actually looks like well i'll need my micro lens you'll probably need not just your macro lens you'll need your microscope because it's smaller than a grain of salt so it started out it was a bit less than a millimeter square but when it's folded it's much much smaller wow now you might ask yourself what would anyone ever use a microscopic flapping bird for and the answer is well nothing for a flapping bird but there are medical devices medical applications implants that are microscopic where you might want a little machine this is a nano injector used in gene therapy to deliver dna to cells it's only four micrometers thick so 400 of them can fit onto a one centimeter wide computer chip there's some things down there that kind of look about star wars to me yes this art called elliptic infinity and we wanted to do that in a material other than paper you see this from flat into that elliptic infinity shape this is actually a lamp that's made from a single sheet so it comes in an envelope like this put its cable in fold it add a clip now this relies on a lot of math the curvature of these lines affects links the bending and curvature here to here to here all of these are coupled and pretty much the only way to design them and get all the folds to play together is by following mathematical methods my professional background is mathematics and physics i i did laser physics for 15 years as a profession i got my phd in applied physics and my kind of my job in many cases was to figure out how to describe lasers mathematically and if i could put my problem in the mathematical language then i could rely on the tools of mathematics to solve those problems and to accomplish the goals but i also felt like origami would be amenable to that same approach so i started trying to figure out how to describe origami using the tools of mathematics and that worked i'm sort of fascinated about the math here like it's hard for me to conceive of like what does that math look like the math comes down to uh a way of representing a design called a crease pattern let me grab a couple of crease patterns okay so this is an origami crease pattern it's a plan for how to fold in this case how to fold a scorpion a really good way of designing something like this is to represent every feature claw leg tail by a circular region a circular shape it's not circular folds it's an abstract it's an abstract concept that you represent the pattern by a circle but then you find an arrangement of those circles on the square like packing balls into a box so for the scorpion you've got a long tail imagine a big circle like a big tin can and the legs are smaller circles or circles of different sizes so you've got different smaller cans and the claws are a couple more circles and you're going to put them into a square box in such a way that they all fit so you pack the circles into the box and the arrangement of those circles tells you the the skeleton of the crease pattern and and from that you can geometrically construct all the crease patterns you follow rules put a line between the center of every pair of circles um and then whenever any two lines meet in a v you add a fold halfway in between it's called a ridge fold and there's similar more complicated rules for adding more and more lines but the thing is it's all step by step it says it if you find this geometric pattern that tells you where to add the next line and you go through that process until you've constructed all the lines and when you're done you can take away the circles they were the scaffolding for your pattern and the pattern of lines that's left is the are the folds you need to create the shape and that's what's shown here and this was probably the biggest revolution in the world of origami design was if you followed that systematic process the fold pattern would give you the exact shape that you set out to fold to begin with the circle packing method that i described this works for anything that can be represented as a stick figure like a scorpion you could draw this as a stick figure with a line for the body and tail lines for each of the legs lines for the claws and from that stick figure from any stick figure you can use circle packing and get a shape that folds it but suppose the thing you're folding is not a stick figure suppose it's something that's more like a surface like a sphere or you know or a cloud or or just in animal terms a big blobby body like an elephant stick figure algorithm is not going to work but there are other algorithms for that about 10 years ago a japanese mathematician named tomohiro tachi developed an algorithm that works for any surface you give it a triangulated surface as a mathematical description and he will give you or his algorithm will give you the folding pattern that folds into that surface it's now quite famous and it's called origamizer and that is a way you could make a sheet of anything and take on any three-dimensional shape so origami is useful in engineering because it provides a method of taking a flat sheet of material and forming it into virtually any shape by folding or if the end product is flat origami offers a way to reduce its dimensions while still deploying easily the simple act of folding can increase rigidity or origami can take advantage of the flexibility of materials to create specific motions and its principles are scalable enabling the miniaturization of devices perhaps most of all origami allows engineers to piggyback on the bright ideas people have had over the centuries while experimenting with folding paper but translating these ideas into practical solutions requires a lot of math modeling and experimentation hey this episode of veritasium was supported by viewers like you on patreon and by audible you know i'm about to take a trip to australia with the whole family and on that long flight if everything is going well i'll be listening to audible the book i am into at the moment is narrative economics how stories go viral and drive major economic events by robert schiller he is a nobel prize-winning economist and also the author of irrational exuberance now outside of the natural sciences i really enjoy learning about economics because it explains so much of what is happening in the world around us for example this book starts off by addressing the phenomenon of bitcoin and schiller's central thesis is that in addition to all the traditional factors thought to affect the economy it is the narratives that go viral the stories that take hold that are instrumental in determining human behavior and therefore economic outcomes now if you haven't 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Channel: Veritasium

Views: 7,753,371

Rating: 4.9624443 out of 5

Keywords: veritasium, origami, engineering, compliant mechanism, mechanism, fold, paper, cactus, shield, crane, solar panels, space, crease pattern, mathematics, physics

Id: ThwuT3_AG6w

Length: 18min 21sec (1101 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 04 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/that1snowflake]

“That took about 7 years from start to finish”

I’m a sophomore in college and I’ve changed my major 3 times how does anyone had the attention span to do something for 7 years???

[u/YOUREABOT]

I really love how deeply Science Bill Murray is invested into this

[u/Coovyy]

This was FASCINATING. Can’t believe I watched the full video, it just flew by.

[u/[deleted]]

Ok, science fiction needs to get on top of this.

[u/MyGodItsFullofStars]

This was brought up in an nn/G class I took on design workshopping. The concept of abstracting a problem out beyond the context for which youre trying to solve in order to find unique solutions.

[u/Mechgandhi]

This video was earlier done by Dustin from Smarter Every day channel on youtube and now it's update by Veritasium is on point.