Robot

Engineering

Biomimetic materials

Materials science

Control engineering

Actuator

DNA origami

Computer science

Biomimetics

Mechanical engineering

Nanotechnology

Work (physics)

Robotics

Artificial intelligence

Morphing

Nanostructure

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Significance Over the past decade, origami has unfolded engineering applications leading to tunable, deployable, and multifunctional systems. Origami-inspired structures currently rely on the use of actuation methods that are pneumatic, mechanical, stimuli-responsive, etc. These actuation strategies commonly lead to bulky actuators, extra wiring, slow speed, or fail to provide a local and distributed actuation. In this work, we introduce a magnetically responsive origami system to expand its shape-changing capability for multifunctionality. We anticipate that the reported magnetic origami system is applicable beyond the bounds of this work, including robotics, morphing mechanisms, biomedical devices, and outer space structures.

Untethered control of functional origami microrobots with distributed actuation