The accelerated evolution of space technology has elevated the importance of high power and lightweight attributes in satellite design. In response to the conflict between the demand for large-scale, high-power payloads and the need for lightweight, compact platforms, flexible space origami membrane structures have emerged as a potential solution. These structures possess the ability to overcome the limitations of traditional deployable mechanisms. Their geometric reconfiguration capabilities, characterized by high folding ratios, effectively satisfy the high-power performance demands. Thus, this paper begins with an overview of the design and application of space origami membranes before investigating the design of creases, deployable mechanisms, and the close connection between the two, focusing on the origami principle. This section introduces various crease types with different motion dimensions, folding characteristics, advantages, disadvantages, and optimization methods. Then, the deployable mechanisms’ structures, principles, and performance characteristics in three unfolding spatial dimensions are presented comprehensively. Based on the preceding sections, this paper reviews the application of the origami principle to spacecraft solar arrays, antennas, solar sails, drag sails, and light shade structures, considering the current status, application purpose, and effect. Finally, the development trend of space origami membrane structures is analyzed.

Given the advantages of softness, lightness, low cost, and interaction safety, inverse kinematic modeling and control of soft actuators has caused a research boom. However, in realizing dexterous manipulation of space large soft manipulators, it is much more difficult to achieve precise control not only because of the greater accumulation of errors in the multiple degrees of freedom and nonlinear properties of soft materials at large scales but also because of the inability of directly solving the inverse kinematics in the cases of singular pure elongation. In this work, a model-free intelligent kinematic control strategy is proposed for these problems that exhibit a mapping relationship between the output end-effector position and the input pressure. For multiple-degree-of-freedom robots, especially pneumatic soft manipulators, traditional inverse kinematic modeling methods are complex and inverse Jacobian matrix solution often encounters geometric singularities. To address this issue, this paper proposes an inverse kinematics–multilayer perceptron (IK-MLP) method for soft manipulators. In this strategy, the trained intelligent controller can be applied to control pneumatic manipulators without establishing a traditional inverse kinematic model. The control algorithm is experimentally tested based on the ground experiment system of the space soft manipulator. Simulations and experiments are carried out to validate the given model-free intelligent controller, proving that the IK-MLP method can effectively solve the singularity of inverse kinematics.