Rigidly Deployable Origami Tubes Based on Kite-Shape Pattern

Abstract

Deployable structures, whose geometry can change to satisfy practical requirements, have attracted a lot of interests from researchers. And a lot of work has been done on the deployable tubes based on origami patterns. In this paper, three new kinds of deployable tubes based on the well-known kite-shape pattern are proposed. The first kind is generalized kite-shape tubes which are obtained by adding parts composed of parallelogram planes to basic kite-shape tubes. By joining a kite-shape tube or its generalization and a tube with a parallelogram cross section and removing the common sides, a second kind of tubes whose cross section can be a polygon with an odd number of sides is developed. Finally, by misaligning two half kite-shape tubes through a transition zone, a third kind of deployable tubes in which the boundary crease lines between neighboring layers can be on different planes are presented. All the three kinds of new deployable tubes are rigid and have one degree of freedom and are ideal for engineering design and applications.