Foldable Robotics is a class which comes from a new class of active robotic devices being developed in research labs across the country. These devices are designed and built using flat sheets of a wide variety of materials, and folded up to create both form and motion. This class studies these devices from initial prototype and design through implementation and optimization, with a focus on application-specific projects which seek to solve problems of cost, parallelism, complexity, and time with a relatively fast and easy prototyping method.

Foldable Robotics has origins in a class taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design called Informal Robotics. This class allows students to delve deeper into the engineering & analytical problems associated with these devices, in topics such as Design, Manufacturing, Dynamics & Simulation, Optimization, Kinematics & Motion, and Stiffness Analysis.