Deployable, Collapsible, Rigid Origami Shelter

For our project, our aim was to explore various methods for constructing rigid, collapsible, deployable origami shelters. First, we explored a method of combining a Hoberman Sphere with a Flasher so that the two systems could be deployed simultaneously. However, we per- formed a volume-compression analysis, and found that an umbrella has a significantly better compression ratio. We reverse-engineered an umbrella to discern its crease pattern. We then adjusted the crease pattern and tailored it to be able to fold into our desired 3D shape, a hemi- sphere. However, we believe that our crease pattern and equations could easily be adjusted to approximate many 3D convex surfaces. We wrote a Matlab script to perform the angle and length calculations for the crease pattern. Our final crease pattern had a volume-compression ratio of 2.1%, which is better than the Hoberman sphere (an average of 4.6%) and very close to the ShedRain umbrella (1.3%). As a proof of concept, we constructed a 1 meter diameter shelter out of 1/16" acrylic and vinyl.