Por João Neves (CFTC).
Folding has emerged as an innovative approach to manufacturing, enabling the transformation of flat materials into complex, functional structures. By reducing dependence on traditional joining techniques such as welding, gluing, and molding, it improves efficiency, minimizes material waste, and facilitates automation. A key challenge in designing foldable structures lies not only in determining the placement of cuts and folds but also in establishing viable folding pathways. Due to the factorial growth of possible sequences with increasing folds, brute-force combinatorial methods become impractical. To overcome this limitation, we propose a graph-based algorithm tailored for polyhedral folding. This method represents the target shape as a graph, where faces act as nodes and edges indicate adjacency, allowing for a systematic exploration of possible folding pathways. By discretizing the configuration space into intermediate states, our approach enhances process optimization, simplifies execution, reduces failure rates, and improves the reliability of automated manufacturing systems.
