Laser Origami: Simplified Manufacturing

What do Audi and Apple have in common? Revolutionary streamlined manufacturing. Nuts and bolts are antiques, and time-consuming weak spots in any product that have historically been nothing but trouble if not tragically disastrous. Imagine a manufacturing process that did not rely on that complex manual assembly at all, but simply folded into place like a beautiful origami creation without seams, screws or adhesive. Researchers at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Germany have worked out a way to do just that, to make single-piece 3D objects using only a 2D laser cutter, and in less time than a 3D printer. They are calling it LaserOrigami: a rapid prototyping system that uses folding, stretching and bending to create the workpiece rather than using joints, thereby eliminating the need for manual assembly. It administers the heat by defocusing the laser, which distributes the laser’s power across a larger surface, once it heats up selected regions of the workpiece they become compliant and bend down under the force of gravity. LaserOrigami then implements cutting and bending in a single integrated process by automatically moving the cutting table up and down. When users take out the workpiece, it is already fully assembled.