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About

Samuel M. Felton is a pioneering roboticist whose work sits at the intersection of origami-inspired engineering, self-assembly, and printable robotics. His research has fundamentally advanced how complex machines can be fabricated cheaply, rapidly, and autonomously from flat, two-dimensional materials. Felton's most celebrated contribution is his development of self-folding machines — robots that autonomously assemble themselves from flat sheets into functional three-dimensional structures. His landmark 2014 paper, "A Method for Building Self-Folding Machines," which has garnered nearly 1,000 citations, demonstrated a crawling robot capable of folding itself without human intervention, a breakthrough that captured widespread scientific and public attention. Building on this, his earlier work on printed inchworm robots (141 citations) established printing and folding as viable rapid-prototyping paradigms for complex machines. Felton has also made significant contributions to programmable origami mechanisms, pneumatic self-actuation, continuously variable transmissions, and feedback-controlled folding — collectively pushing origami robotics toward greater precision, adaptability, and real-world utility. His integrated approach to embedding sensors directly into foldable structures has further enabled closed-loop control in self-assembled systems. Across his body of work, Felton has helped establish origami engineering as a credible and transformative framework for the future of robotics manufacturing.