Closure polynomials for strips of tetrahedra

The final publication is available at link.springer.comA tetrahedral strip is a tetrahedron-tetrahedron truss where any tetrahedron has two neighbors except those in the extremes which have only one. Unless any of the tetrahedra degenerate, such a truss is rigid. In this case, if the distance between the strip endpoints is imposed, any rod length in the truss is constrained by all the others to attain discrete values. In this paper, it is shown how to characterize these values as the roots of a closure polynomial whose derivation requires surprisingly no other tools than elementary algebraic manipulations. As an application of this result, the forward kinematics of two parallel platforms with closure polynomials of degree 16 and 12 is straightforwardly solved.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Closure polynomials for strips of tetrahedra

The final publication is available at link.springer.comA tetrahedral strip is a tetrahedron-tetrahedron truss where any tetrahedron has two neighbors except those in the extremes which have only one. Unless any of the tetrahedra degenerate, such a truss is rigid. In this case, if the distance between the strip endpoints is imposed, any rod length in the truss is constrained by all the others to attain discrete values. In this paper, it is shown how to characterize these values as the roots of a closure polynomial whose derivation requires surprisingly no other tools than elementary algebraic manipulations. As an application of this result, the forward kinematics of two parallel platforms with closure polynomials of degree 16 and 12 is straightforwardly solved.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The forward kinematics of doubly-planar Gough-Stewart platforms and the position analysis of strips of tetrahedra

The final publication is available at link.springer.comA strip of tetrahedra is a tetrahedron-tetrahedron truss where any tetrahedron has two neighbors except those in the extremes which have only one. The problem of finding all the possible lengths for an edge in the strip compatible with a given distance imposed between the strip end-points has been revealed of relevance due to the large number of possible applications. In this paper, this is applied to solve the forward kinematics of 6-6 Gough-Stewart platforms with planar base and moving platform, a problem which is known to have up to 40 solutions (20 if we do not consider mirror configurations with respect to the base as different solutions).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A generalisation of the deformation variety

Given an ideal triangulation of a connected 3-manifold with non-empty boundary consisting of a disjoint union of tori, a point of the deformation variety is an assignment of complex numbers to the dihedral angles of the tetrahedra subject to Thurston's gluing equations. From this, one can recover a representation of the fundamental group of the manifold into the isometries of 3-dimensional hyperbolic space. However, the deformation variety depends crucially on the triangulation: there may be entire components of the representation variety which can be obtained from the deformation variety with one triangulation but not another. We introduce a generalisation of the deformation variety, which again consists of assignments of complex variables to certain dihedral angles subject to polynomial equations, but together with some extra combinatorial data concerning degenerate tetrahedra. This "extended deformation variety" deals with many situations that the deformation variety cannot. In particular we show that for any ideal triangulation of a small orientable 3-manifold with a single torus boundary component, we can recover all of the irreducible non-dihedral representations from the associated extended deformation variety. More generally, we give an algorithm to produce a triangulation of a given orientable 3-manifold with torus boundary components for which the same result holds. As an application, we show that this extended deformation variety detects all factors of the PSL(2,C) A-polynomial associated to the components consisting of the representations it recovers.Comment: 47 pages, 26 figures. Rewrote introduction and added motivation section based on referee's comments. Rewrote the section on retriangulation, and added new result on small manifolds with a single cus

Closed-form position analysis of variable geometry trusses

© . This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Variable geometry trusses are composed, in general, of unit cells which can be modeled as bars connected by spherical joints. Under mild conditions, it has been shown that the only feasible cells are topologically equivalent to bipyramids. Unfortunately, using standard formulations, the closed-form position analysis of bipyramids is not a trivial task. Actually, it has only been achieved for bipyramids with up to 7 vertices, whose closure polynomial has been shown to be of order 24. In this paper, using a distance-based formulation and a kinematic inversion for fans of tetrahedra, the problem is solved for bipyramids with up to 11 vertices, whose closure polynomial is of degree 896. No other position analysis problem leading to such a high-order closure polynomial has been previously solved.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Yet another approach to the Gough-Stewart platform forward kinematics

© 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The forward kinematics of the Gough-Stewart platform, and their simplified versions in which some leg endpoints coalesce, has been typically solved using variable elimination methods. In this paper, we cast doubts on whether this is the easiest way to solve the problem. We will see how the indirect approach in which the length of some extra virtual legs is first computed leads to important simplifications. In particular, we provide a procedure to solve 30 out of 34 possible topologies for a Gough-Stewart platform without variable elimination.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Distance geometry in active structures

The final publication is available at link.springer.comDistance constraints are an emerging formulation that offers intuitive geometrical interpretation of otherwise complex problems. The formulation can be applied in problems such as position and singularity analysis and path planning of mechanisms and structures. This paper reviews the recent advances in distance geometry, providing a unified view of these apparently disparate problems. This survey reviews algebraic and numerical techniques, and is, to the best of our knowledge, the first attempt to summarize the different approaches relating to distance-based formulations.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

3-manifolds efficiently bound 4-manifolds

It is known since 1954 that every 3-manifold bounds a 4-manifold. Thus, for instance, every 3-manifold has a surgery diagram. There are several proofs of this fact, including constructive proofs, but there has been little attention to the complexity of the 4-manifold produced. Given a 3-manifold M of complexity n, we show how to construct a 4-manifold bounded by M of complexity O(n^2). Here we measure ``complexity'' of a piecewise-linear manifold by the minimum number of n-simplices in a triangulation. It is an open question whether this quadratic bound can be replaced by a linear bound. The proof goes through the notion of "shadow complexity" of a 3-manifold M. A shadow of M is a well-behaved 2-dimensional spine of a 4-manifold bounded by M. We prove that, for a manifold M satisfying the Geometrization Conjecture with Gromov norm G and shadow complexity S, c_1 G <= S <= c_2 G^2 for suitable constants c_1, c_2. In particular, the manifolds with shadow complexity 0 are the graph manifolds.Comment: 39 pages, 21 figures; added proof for spin case as wel

A Geometric Toolbox for Tetrahedral Finite Element Partitions

In this work we present a survey of some geometric results on tetrahedral partitions and their refinements in a unified manner. They can be used for mesh generation and adaptivity in practical calculations by the finite element method (FEM), and also in theoretical finite element (FE) analysis. Special emphasis is laid on the correspondence between relevant results and terminology used in FE computations, and those established in the area of discrete and computational geometry (DCG)