Internal continuous flattening of polyhedra (Q2308508)

Flattening a \(3\)-dimensional polyhedron consists in folding its boundary along creases into a multilayered surface contained in the plane [\textit{E. D. Demaine} and \textit{J. O'Rourke}, Geometric folding algorithms. Linkages, origami, polyhedra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2007; Zbl 1135.52009)]. It is known that, when the polyhedron is convex, there exists a continuous motion (called orderly squashing) to such a flat folded state [\textit{Z. Abel} et al., in: Proceedings of the 30th annual symposium on computational geometry, SoCG '14, Kyoto, Japan, June 8--11, 2014. New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). 396--405 (2014; Zbl 1395.68274)]. If the polyhedron is not convex, the existence of a continuous flattening motion is, so far, an open problem. It is noteworthy that two different types of creases can occur during continuous flattening: a crease can be either fixed or moving relative to the facet it is contained in. According to the bellows theorem [\textit{R. Connelly} et al., Beitr. Algebra Geom. 38, No. 1, 1--10 (1997; Zbl 0939.52009)], moving creases cannot be avoided if the flattening motion is required to be continuous. In this article, the authors investigate the existence of internal continuous flattening motions for some families of non-necessarily convex polyhedra. In such motions, all the intermediate states between a polyhedron \(P\) and the flat folded state must be contained in \(P\). Since the boundary of \(P\) has to pass through all of \(P\) during a continuous flattening motion, internal motions are minimal in terms of the portion of space they cover. The authors show that (1) a slight modification of the orderly squashing process provides an internal continuous flattening motion for a regular tetrahedron, (2) there is an internal continuous flattening motion for any pyramid over a convex polygon under the condition that all the internal angles of the pyramid at the edges of that polygon are the same, and (3) there exists an internal continuous flattening motion for any right prism over a polygon (that is not required to be convex). In (2), there is no crease on the base of the pyramid and, in (3) no moving crease on the lateral facets. While (1) and (2) are obtained by adapting known techniques, (3) results from the introduction of a new flattening procedure.