Potential for manufacturing processes, which are great at depositing in flat layers at very small scales. Structures manufactured flat can subsequently be folded into 3D shapes. It's a candidate method for making very small machines.
Wood's group (and possibly others - not my field) have even shown that pre-stressed parts can be built into the layers that cause the structure to 'pop-up' into it's 3D shape, or nearly, when released from its manufacturing scaffold. Neat.
Another sometimes-cited motivation for folding robot parts is fitting planetary rovers neatly inside their spacecraft, or inserting robots into nuclear reactors through small service pipes.
Wood's group (and possibly others - not my field) have even shown that pre-stressed parts can be built into the layers that cause the structure to 'pop-up' into it's 3D shape, or nearly, when released from its manufacturing scaffold. Neat.
Examples along with more nice things at http://micro.seas.harvard.edu/research.html
Another sometimes-cited motivation for folding robot parts is fitting planetary rovers neatly inside their spacecraft, or inserting robots into nuclear reactors through small service pipes.