Explosive rigidity percolation in origami

Abstract: Origami, the traditional art of paper folding, has revolutionized science and technology in recent years and has been found useful in various real-world applications. In particular, origami-inspired structures have been utilized for robotics and mechanical information storage, in both of which the rigidity control of origami plays a crucial role. However, most prior works have only considered the origami design problem using purely deterministic or stochastic approaches. In this paper, we study the rigidity control of origami using the idea of explosive percolation. Specifically, to turn a maximally floppy origami structure into a maximally rigid origami structure, one can combine a random sampling process of origami facets and some simple selection rules, which allow us to exploit the power of choices and significantly accelerate or delay the rigidity percolation transition. We further derive simple formulas that connect the rigidity percolation transition effects with the origami pattern size and the number of choices, thereby providing an effective way to determine the optimal number of choices for achieving prescribed rigidity percolation transition accuracy and sharpness. Altogether, our work paves a new way for the rigidity control of mechanical metamaterials.