PLoS ONE (Jan 2021)

Path planning for the Platonic solids on prescribed grids by edge-rolling.

  • Ngoc Tam Lam,
  • Ian Howard,
  • Lei Cui

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0252613
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 16, no. 6
p. e0252613

Abstract

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The five Platonic solids-tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron-have found many applications in mathematics, science, and art. Path planning for the Platonic solids had been suggested, but not validated, except for solving the rolling-cube puzzles for a cubic dice. We developed a path-planning algorithm based on the breadth-first-search algorithm that generates a shortest path for each Platonic solid to reach a desired pose, including position and orientation, from an initial one on prescribed grids by edge-rolling. While it is straightforward to generate triangular and square grids, various methods exist for regular-pentagon tiling. We chose the Penrose tiling because it has five-fold symmetry. We discovered that a tetrahedron could achieve only one orientation for a particular position.