Bifurcations in mechanical structures: from smart folding to folding smarts

Self-folding structures (also known as 4D printing) have emerged as a potential technique for the fabrication of complex structures in three dimensions, much as origami artists fold an intricate shape from flat sheets of paper. Recently, it has become clear self-folding origami exhibits a complex, bifurcated configuration space with exponentially many branches - making self-folding difficult. I will describe recent work extending this analysis to more complex origami having 2 or more degrees of freedom and explore, in detail, how to program a structure to fold robustly despite the proliferation of misfolding pathways. Finally, I will describe how to use the bifurcations and nonlinearities in origami and other mechanical structures to design “smart materials” - metamaterials that can perform logical operations.