Three open problems on folding/unfolding are discussed: (1) Can every convex polyhedron be cut along edges and unfolded at to a single nonoverlapping piece? (2) Given gluing instructions for a polygon, construct the unique 3D convex polyhedron to which itfolds. (3) Can every planar polygonal chain be straightened?

author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. ii Acknowledgments My time as a graduate student has been the best period of my life so far, and for that wonderful experience I owe many thanks. I had two excellent advisors, Anna Lubiw and Ian Munro. I started working with Anna after I took her two classes on algorithms and computational geometry during my Master’s, which got me excited about both these areas, and even caused me to switch entire fields of computer science, from distributed systems to theory and algorithms. Anna introduced me to Ian when some of our problems in computational geometry turned out to have large data structural components, and my work with Ian blossomed from there. The sets of problems I worked on with Anna and Ian diverged, and both remain my primary interests. Anna and Ian have had a profound influence throughout my academic career. At the most

We present an algorithm to unfold any triangulated 2-manifold (in particular, any simplicial polyhedron) into a non-overlapping, connected planar layout in linear time. The manifold is cut only along its edges. The resulting layout is connected, but it may have a disconnected interior; the triangles are connected at vertices, but not necessarily joined along edges. We extend our algorithm to establish a similar result for simplicial manifolds of arbitrary dimension.

Abstract. Let S be the boundary of a convex polytope of dimension d + 1, or more generally let S be a convex polyhedral pseudomanifold. We prove that S has a polyhedral nonoverlapping unfolding into R d, so the metric space S is obtained from a closed (usually nonconvex) polyhedral ball in R d by identifying pairs of boundary faces isometrically. Our existence proof exploits geodesic flow away from a source point v ∈ S, which is the exponential map to S from the tangent space at v. We characterize the cut locus (the closure of the set of points in S with more than one shortest path to v) as a polyhedral complex in terms of Voronoi diagrams on facets. Analyzing infinitesimal expansion of the wavefront consisting of points at constant distance from v on S produces an algorithmic method for constructing Voronoi diagrams in each facet, and hence the unfolding of S. The algorithm, for which we provide pseudocode, solves the discrete geodesic problem. Its main construction generalizes the source unfolding for boundaries of 3-polytopes into R 2. We present conjectures concerning the number of shortest paths on the boundaries of convex polyhedra, and concerning continuous unfolding of convex polyhedra. We also comment on the intrinsic non-polynomial complexity of nonconvex manifolds.

this paper, we study the problem of whether a polyhedron can be obtained from a net , i.e., a polygon and a set of creases, by folding along the creases. We consider two cases, depending on whether we are given the dihedral angle at each crease. If these dihedral angles are given the problem can be solved in polynomial time by the simple expedient of performing the folding. If the dihedral angles are not given the problem is NP-complete, at least for orthogonal polyhedra. We then turn to the actual folding process, and show an example of a net with rigid faces that can, in the sense above, be folded to form an orthogonal polyhedron, but only by allowing faces to intersect each other during the folding process.

This thesis contains new results on the subject of polygonal structure reconfiguration. Specifically, the types of structures considered here are polygons, polygonal chains, triangulations, and polyhedral surfaces. A sequence of vertices (points), successively joined by straight edges, is a polygonal chain. If the sequence is cyclic, then the object is a polygon. A planar triangulation is a set of vertices with a maximal number of non-crossing straight edges joining them. A polyhedral surface is a three-dimensional structure consisting of flat polygonal faces that are joined by common edges. For each of these structures there exist several methods of reconfiguration. Any such method must provide a well-defined way of transforming one instance of a struc-ture to any other. Several types of reconfigurations are reviewed in the introduction, which is followed by new results. We begin with efficient algorithms for comparing monotone chains. Next, we prove that flat chains with unit-length edges and an-gles within a wide range always admit reconfigurations, under the dihedral model of motion. In this model, angles and edge lengths are preserved. For the universal

We study algorithmic aspects of bending wires and sheet metal into a specified structure. Problems of this type are closely related to the question of deciding whether a simple non-self-intersecting wire structure (a carpenter's ruler) can be straightened, a problem that was open for several years and has only recently been solved in the affirmative. If we impose some of the constraints...

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We present two algorithms for unfolding the surface of any polyhedron, all of whose faces are triangles, to a nonoverlapping, connected planar layout. The surface is cut only along polyhedron edges. The layout is connected, but it may have a disconnected interior: the triangles are connected at vertices, but not necessarily joined along edges. 1

We prove that there is a polyhedron with genus 6 whose faces are orthogonal polygons (equivalently, rectangles) and yet the angles between some faces are not multiples , so the polyhedron itself is not orthogonal. On the other hand, we prove that any such polyhedron must have genus at least 3. These results improve the bounds of Donoso and O'Rourke [4] that there are nonorthogonal polyhedra with orthogonal faces and genus 7 or larger, and any such polyhedron must have genus at least 2. We also demonstrate nonoverlapping one-piece edge-unfoldings (nets) for the genus-7 and genus-6 polyhedra.