SBIR Phase I: Computer Aided Design and Simulation Software for Origami

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The broader impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to enable widespread adoption of origami design principles in industry to create manufacturing efficiencies and promote technological innovation. Origami-inspired engineering has applications across virtually all Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields, yet existing computer-aided design (CAD) tools are extremely limited in their ability to model folded geometries. This Phase I project and subsequent commercialization effort will fill a gap in the market by creating powerful and user-friendly software to model folding, with target customers spanning a broad range of industries: product design, architecture, packaging, papercraft, education, manufacturing, and materials engineering. Academic publications resulting from the research and development conducted during this project will advance fundamental knowledge of the mathematics of folding. Furthermore, this work seeks to create positive educational impacts through ongoing collaborations with K-12 STEM educators to create engaging curricula in geometry, digital design, and manufacturing through papercraft.This SBIR Phase I project will create an intelligent software system that facilitates the design and simulation of folded geometries via powerful origami editing techniques grounded in fundamental research. The Phase I research and development builds on the team’s prior work on origami design algorithms and efficient origami simulation methods to establish a novel design framework that supports intuitive editing of folded geometry by novice users. A particular focus of the project is the under-explored domain of curved crease origami, which promises new opportunities for high-performance materials engineering and expressive design. Phase I research studies will investigate key open research problems underpinning the CAD system; this work will establish efficient methods and mathematical bounds for critical origami design algorithms to be implemented by the software system. Primary technical hurdles of the Phase I project include: architecting a novel constraint management system to support interactive editing of origami designs, establishing novel computational design algorithms for curved crease origami, and developing core data structures and geometry processing methods to be used by the CAD system. Throughout Phase I, the team will work with customers and strategic partners to identify specific use cases of folding in key vertical markets, develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) software application, and evaluate technical progress in terms of its commercial potential.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.