Our founder began folding origami after reading the story of Sadako Sasaki and the Thousand Cranes 24yrs ago. From there he began folding origami vigorously from diagrams and books until he started designing his own 8yrs later. Though folding the world’s most complex origami required a great deal of precision, designing origami exposed Robert to an entirely different way of thinking about not just paper, but the world.

In origami every folded feature is intimately and geometrically interrelated with every other folded feature in complex and often unforeseen ways. Expanding the wingspan of an origami eagle might shrink the tail feathers, shorten the legs, and shift the wings forward and all else back, all to different degrees.

Designing origami required an understanding of complex interdependent systems and how to transform them, reliably, and consistently toward solutions.

It wasn’t many more years before Robert could design origami faster than he could fold them and it wasn’t long after that that he made plans to apply these newfound principles of synergy and interdependence to other complex interdependent systems.

In 2015, Robert joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to solve an outstanding origami problem on the Starshade project that required a variety of novel origami mathematical developments. It was while on the Starshade project that Robert was introduced to the merits of tensegrity and inflatable devices as well. In 2016, Robert returned to JPL to design large deployable heliostats that incorporated tensegrity, origami, and inflatable elements to illuminate permanently shaded lunar craters from a small deployable package. He remained at JPL leading the development of a large deployable walking robot for the exploration of especially course terrain in extreme environments. In 2017, Robert and his team won first place at a Start Up Competition in Santa Barbara for his invention of an origami deployable solar concentrator for desalination, water purification, cooking, and food preservation. In 2018, Robert returned to JPL to create a large design space of origami sandwich-structured composites to exceed the properties of honeycomb for the Starshade project. Before finally leaving JPL at the start of 2021 to found Salazar Design where he could take on projects from aerospace to architecture to medical devices.