Most people when they think of origami, think,
you know, my eight-year-old is doing origami.
Why are these engineers at BYU
working with origami?
BYU's connection with origami
began with the realization that origami
was really a complaint mechanism.
So a complaint mechanism is a device
that gets its motion from
things like bending and deflection,
instead of hinges and bearings.
We can actually make them very
low cost sometimes.
They can also operate in very harsh
environments like the environment of space.
Origami helps inspire new 
ways of looking at
how mechanisms can work or how we can
approach solutions to problems.
It's very expensive and very difficult to
get things into space,
and the nice thing with a lot of origami 
is you can make it very compact
for launch, and as you get into space you
can deploy and be very large.
I'm working on an origami inspired
deployable solar array
for spacecraft. The panel 
hanging behind me
is the 20th scale prototype 
of this 25-meter array system.
By using origami principles, 
we can get a much larger
array into space by stowing it 
compactly during launch
and then opening up once we're in space.
The spacecraft would be inside a rocket,
like an Atlas 5 rocket,
and the solar array would wrap around the
outside of the space craft,
and it would be all folded up compactly 
and then launched into space and deployed.
This is our cubesat version.
As we open it, it opens 
to about 50 centimeters
and has the potential to generate about
65 watts of energy at this actual size.
Cubesats are kind of the new novel way 
of getting things into space quickly
because the're small, they 
don't cost a lot, and you can
throw them on with any rocket that's going into space.
In addition to working with
people like the National Science
Foundation, we have projects with
NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in
Alabama and also with
the JPAL. These are the same 
people that do the Mars rover and
other things. We are doing origami
inspired mechanisms,
as an expanding solar array. We're involved as a collaborator with Robert Lang,
who is a world-renowned expert in origami.
It's very unique to work with someone who is such an expert. He's defined an area for himself in this
mathematics and origami crossover field.
And so this combination of taking this art
this ancient art and combining it with
engineering, we've been able to discover
new things and new motions
that wouldn't otherwise be possible.
I think the biggest thing to learn from this kind of
research is that you can find 
inspiration for designs from anything.
If you're open to inspiration from any of 
these sources, then your creativity is not limited.
