Kirigami, the traditional art of paper cutting, offers significant potential to advance robotics by enabling multifunctional, lightweight, and highly adaptable systems. The deformation of kirigami architectures is often governed by bending-dominated regimes, providing enhanced compliance, resilience to tensile loading, and the ability to undergo large shape transformations under relatively small actuation forces. In this talk, I will present several examples illustrating how cut geometries and geometric nonlinearities can be strategically exploited to create functional kirigami structures for bioinspired limbless locomotion. Despite these advances, key challenges remain, particularly in the systematic design of cut patterns for targeted functionalities and in the development of scalable, efficient fabrication methods.
Ahmad Rafsanjani - Tailoring materials into kirigami robots
Ahmad Rafsanjani is a Professor of Soft Robotics in the Biorobotics section of the Maersk Mc-Kinney Møller Institute at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU). He received his doctoral degree in 2013 from ETH Zurich. Prior to joining SDU, he held postdoctoral positions with Daminao Pasini at McGill University, Katia Bertoldi at Harvard University, and André Studart in Complex Materials at ETH Zurich. His research group at SDU Soft Robotics develops adaptive, flexible systems inspired by nature, often realized through kirigami- and origami-based metamaterials and composite materials for friction-driven limbless locomotion and soft robotic perception.
Published Apr. 14, 2026 12:03 PM
- Last modified Apr. 14, 2026 12:03 PM