Optimizations for Tensorial Bernstein-Based Solvers by Using Polyhedral Bounds

The tensorial Bernstein basis for multivariate polynomials in n variables has a number 3n of functions for degree 2. Consequently, computing the representation of a multivariate polynomial in the tensorial Bernstein basis is an exponential time algorithm, which makes tensorial Bernstein-based solvers impractical for systems with more than n= 6 or 7 variables. This article describes a polytope (Bernstein polytope) with a number O( (n,2 ) ) of faces, which allows to bound a sparse, multivariate polynomial expressed in the canonical basis by solving several linear programming problems. We compare the performance of a subdivision solver using domain reductions by linear programming with a solver using a change to the tensorial Bernstein basis for domain reduction. The performance is similar for n= 2 variables but only the solver using linear programming on the Bernstein polytope can cope with a large number of variables. We demonstrate this difference with two formulations of the forward kinematics problem of a Gough-Stewart parallel robot: a direct Cartesian formulation and a coordinate-free formulation using Cayley-Menger determinants, followed by a computation of Cartesian coordinates. Furthermore, we present an optimization of the Bernstein polytope-based solver for systems containing only the monomials xi and x2 i . For these, it is possible to obtain even better domain bounds at no cost using the quadratic curve (xi,x i ) directly.