Characterization and Construction of a Family of Highly Symmetric Spherical Polyhedra with Application in Modeling Self-Assembling Structures

The regular polyhedra have the highest order of 3D symmetries and are exceptionally attractive templates for (self)-assembly using minimal types of building blocks, from nano-cages and virus capsids to large scale constructions like glass domes. However, they only represent a small number of possible spherical layouts which can serve as templates for symmetric assembly. In this paper, we formalize the necessary and sufficient conditions for symmetric assembly using exactly one type of building block. All such assemblies correspond to spherical polyhedra which are edge-transitive and face-transitive, but not necessarily vertex-transitive. This describes a new class of polyhedra outside of the well-studied Platonic, Archimedean, Catalan and and Johnson solids. We show that this new family, dubbed almost-regular polyhedra, can be parameterized using only two variables and provide an efficient algorithm to generate an infinite series of such polyhedra. Additionally, considering the almost-regular polyhedra as templates for the assembly of 3D spherical shell structures, we developed an efficient polynomial time shell assembly approximation algorithm for an otherwise NP-hard geometric optimization problem.