Squaring the Cube: Efficiently Stowed Deployable Mechanisms with Thick Rectangular Payload Panels

We develop and demonstrate two families of deployable mechanisms, the Yoshimura-Miura-ori, and the Waterbomb- Miura-ori, that stow into an efficiently packed cube (or other rectangular parallelopiped), deploy into a planar square or rectangular array, and contain rectilinear payload panels with a uniform thickness and flat top and bottom surfaces. The stowed form achieves high volumetric packing efficiency and the deployed form achieves a high duty factor. The mechanisms are demonstrated in hardware and multiple versions are described.