Deployable polyhedrons with one-DOF radial transformation

Abstract: Deployable polyhedrons can transform between Platonic and Archimedean polyhedrons to meet the demands of various engineering applications. However, the existing design solutions are often with multiple degrees of freedom and complicated mechanism links and joints, which greatly limited their potential in practice. Combining the fundamentals of solid geometry and mechanism kinematics, this paper proposes a family of kirigami Archimedean polyhedrons based on the N-fold-symmetric loops of spatial 7R linkage, which perform one-DOF radial transformation following tetrahedral, octahedral, or icosahedral symmetry. Moreover, in each symmetric polyhedral group, three different transforming paths can be achieved from one identical deployed configuration. We also demonstrated that such design strategy can be readily applied to polyhedral tessellation. This work provides a family of rich solutions for deployable polyhedrons to facilitate their applications in aerospace exploration, architecture, metamaterials and so on.