Origami is the ancient Japanese art of paper folding. One uncut square of paper can, in the hands of an origami artist, be folded into a bird, a frog, a sailboat, or a Japanese samurai helmet beetle.

Though the past 15 years have seen an exciting run of creative scientific advances in fabricating three-dimensional (3-D) structures by self-folding of 2-D sheets, the complexity of structures ...