Mapping the discrete folding landscape

Fuente: arXiv
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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Neves, João C., Marques, Bernardo R., Dias, Cristóvão S., Araújo, Nuno A. M.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Neves, João C.
Marques, Bernardo R.
Dias, Cristóvão S.
Araújo, Nuno A. M.
author_facet Neves, João C.
Marques, Bernardo R.
Dias, Cristóvão S.
Araújo, Nuno A. M.
contents Folding is emerging as a promising manufacturing process to transform flat materials into functional structures, offering efficiency by reducing the need for welding, gluing, and molding, while minimizing waste and enabling automation. Designing target shapes requires not only to determine cuts and folds, but also folding pathways. Simple combinatorics is impractical as the possibilities grow factorially with the number of folds. To address this, we present a graph-based algorithm for polyhedral shapes. By representing the target shape as a graph, where nodes correspond to faces and edges represent adjacency, the algorithm identifies all possible fold sequences and maps the configuration space into a discrete set of intermediate configurations. This systematic mapping is critical for the design of optimized processes, the simplifying of folding operations, the reduction of failures, and the improvement of manufacturing reliability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_15588
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mapping the discrete folding landscape
Neves, João C.
Marques, Bernardo R.
Dias, Cristóvão S.
Araújo, Nuno A. M.
Soft Condensed Matter
Folding is emerging as a promising manufacturing process to transform flat materials into functional structures, offering efficiency by reducing the need for welding, gluing, and molding, while minimizing waste and enabling automation. Designing target shapes requires not only to determine cuts and folds, but also folding pathways. Simple combinatorics is impractical as the possibilities grow factorially with the number of folds. To address this, we present a graph-based algorithm for polyhedral shapes. By representing the target shape as a graph, where nodes correspond to faces and edges represent adjacency, the algorithm identifies all possible fold sequences and maps the configuration space into a discrete set of intermediate configurations. This systematic mapping is critical for the design of optimized processes, the simplifying of folding operations, the reduction of failures, and the improvement of manufacturing reliability.
title Mapping the discrete folding landscape
topic Soft Condensed Matter
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15588