Design of an origami-based cylindrical deployable mechanism

In this paper, an innovative cylindrical deployable mechanism (DM) based on rigid origami is presented, which is used to design a parabolic cylindrical deployable antenna. The mechanism can be deployed from the cuboid folded configuration to the cylindrical unfolded configuration with only one actuator. First, an innovative deployable string is proposed based on different types of four-vertices origami unit cells and kirigami techniques. By considering the units as 6R single-loop mechanisms, the kinematics of the origami unit cells are analyzed. Through the connection of identical deployable strings, the cylindrical DM is constructed, and its mobility is analyzed utilizing the screw theory. Then the proposed DM is used to design a parabolic cylindrical deployable antenna. A number of pillars are installed on the panels of the DM, and their lengths are determined to fit the required parabolic cylindrical surface. To verify the feasibility of the design, a scaled prototype of the deployable antenna is constructed.