On the sum of the Voronoi polytope of a lattice with a zonotope

A parallelotope $P$ is a polytope that admits a facet-to-facet tiling of space by translation copies of $P$ along a lattice. The Voronoi cell $P_V(L)$ of a lattice $L$ is an example of a parallelotope. A parallelotope can be uniquely decomposed as the Minkowski sum of a zone closed parallelotope $P$ and a zonotope $Z(U)$, where $U$ is the set of vectors used to generate the zonotope. In this paper we consider the related question: When is the Minkowski sum of a general parallelotope and a zonotope $P+Z(U)$ a parallelotope? We give two necessary conditions and show that the vectors $U$ have to be free. Given a set $U$ of free vectors, we give several methods for checking if $P + Z(U)$ is a parallelotope. Using this we classify such zonotopes for some highly symmetric lattices. In the case of the root lattice $\mathsf{E}_6$, it is possible to give a more geometric description of the admissible sets of vectors $U$. We found that the set of admissible vectors, called free vectors, is described by the well-known configuration of $27$ lines in a cubic. Based on a detailed study of the geometry of $P_V(\mathsf{e}_6)$, we give a simple characterization of the configurations of vectors $U$ such that $P_V(\mathsf{E}_6) + Z(U)$ is a parallelotope. The enumeration yields $10$ maximal families of vectors, which are presented by their description as regular matroids.Comment: 30 pages, 4 figures, 4 table

Congruence and Metrical Invariants of Zonotopes

Zonotopes are studied from the point of view of central symmetry and how volumes of facets and the angles between them determine a zonotope uniquely. New proofs are given for theorems of Shephard and McMullen characterizing a zonotope by the central symmetry of faces of a fixed dimension. When a zonotope is regarded as the Minkowski sum of line segments determined by the columns of a defining matrix, the product of the transpose of that matrix and the matrix acts as a shape matrix containing information about the edges of the zonotope and the angles between them. Congruence between zonotopes is determined by equality of shape matrices. This condition is used, together with volume computations for zonotopes and their facets, to obtain results about rigidity and about the uniqueness of a zonotope given arbitrary normal-vector and facet-volume data. These provide direct proofs in the case of zonotopes of more general theorems of Alexandrov on the rigidity of convex polytopes, and Minkowski on the uniqueness of convex polytopes given certain normal-vector and facet-volume data. For a zonotope, this information is encoded in the next-to-highest exterior power of the defining matrix.Comment: 23 pages (typeface increased to 12pts). Errors corrected include proofs of 1.5, 3.5, and 3.8. Comments welcom

Bounded Error Identification of Systems With Time-Varying Parameters

This note presents a new approach to guaranteed system identification for time-varying parameterized discrete-time systems. A bounded description of noise in the measurement is considered. The main result is an algorithm to compute a set that contains the parameters consistent with the measured output and the given bound of the noise. This set is represented by a zonotope, that is, an affine map of a unitary hypercube. A recursive procedure minimizes the size of the zonotope with each noise corrupted measurement. The zonotopes take into account the time-varying nature of the parameters in a nonconservative way. An example has been provided to clarify the algorithm

A set-membership state estimation algorithm based on DC programming

This paper presents a new approach to guaranteed state estimation for nonlinear discrete-time systems with a bounded description of noise and parameters. The sets of states that are consistent with the evolution of the system, the measured outputs and bounded noise and parameters are represented by zonotopes. DC programming and intersection operations are used to obtain a tight bound. An example is given to illustrate the proposed algorithm.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología DPI2006-15476-C02-01Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología DPI2007-66718-C04-01

Determinants and the volumes of parallelotopes and zonotopes

AbstractThe Minkowski sum of edges corresponding to the column vectors of a matrix A with real entries is the same as the image of a unit cube under the linear transformation defined by A with respect to the standard bases. The geometric object obtained in this way is a zonotope, Z(A). If the columns of the matrix are linearly independent, the object is a parallelotope, P(A). In the first section, we derive formulas for the volume of P(A) in various ways as ATA, as the square root of the sum of the squares of the maximal minors of A, and as the product of the lengths of the edges of P(A) times the square root of the determinant of the matrix of cosines of angles between pairs of edges. In the second section, we use the volume formulas to derive real-case versions of several well-known determinantal inequalities—those of Hadamard, Fischer, Koteljanskii, Fan, and Szasz—involving principal minors of a positive-definite Hermitian matrix. In the last section, we consider zonotopes, obtain a new proof of the decomposition of a zonotope into its generating parallelotopes, and obtain a volume formula for Z(A)