Simulating panel contacts within an origami structures have always been a challenging tasks for designing origami inspired structures. In this paper, Yi Zhu and his adviser Professor Evgueni Filipov at University of Michigan developed a numerical simulation framework that can detects and simulates the contact mechanics between origami panels. A contact potential is proposed such that infinite repulsive forces are generated when the closest distance between contacting nodes and panels is approaching zero. The behavior of the proposed simulation is studied in details and a MATLAB simulation software, Origami Contact Simulator, was developed and published.

Link to the paper

Origami Contact Simulator

This is a MATLAB simulation software package that runs the origami contact model developed in the RSPA paper. The simulation code is completely open source and we welcome origami designers and engineers to download it and play with it. We are actively upgrading and debugging the codes to accomplish more sophisticated simulations for our research. Please feel free to contact us if you have any suggestions or questions on the simulation codes. 

Download Software Package Here:  OrigamiContactSimulator

Simulator on GitHub: Link 

Acknowledgement:

We would like to acknowledge the prior works from Ke Liu and Glaucio H. Paulino for non-rigid origami simulators. Their works paved the way for the development of this code.

Images from the paper:

Simulating a self-interlocking origami pattern with the proposed model
Using the model to check the correct folding sequence of an origami