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Rigid origami inspires new design technology in deployable structures with large deployable ratio due to the property of flat foldability. In this paper, we present a general kinematic model of rigid origami pattern and obtain a family of deployable prismatic structures. Basically, a four-crease vertex rigid origami pattern can be presented as a spherical 4R linkage, and the multivertex patterns are the assemblies of spherical linkages. Thus, this prismatic origami structure is modeled as a closed loop of spherical 4R linkages, which includes all the possible prismatic deployable structures consisting of quadrilateral facets and four-crease vertices. By solving the compatibility of the kinematic model, a new group of 2n-sided deployable prismatic structures with plane symmetric intersections is derived with multilayer, straight and curvy variations. The general design method for the 2n-sided multilayer deployable prismatic structures is proposed. All the deployable structures constructed with this method have single degree-of-freedom (DOF), can be deployed and folded without stretching or twisting the facets, and have the compactly flat-folded configuration, which makes it to have great potential in engineering applications.

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