Planar minimally rigid graphs and pseudo-triangulations

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Abstract

Pointed pseudo-triangulations are planar minimally rigid graphs embedded in the plane with pointed vertices (adjacent to an angle larger than π). In this paper we prove that the opposite statement is also true, namely that planar minimally rigid graphs always admit pointed embeddings, even under certain natural topological and combinatorial constraints. The proofs yield efficient embedding algorithms. They also provide the first algorithmically effective result on graph embeddings with oriented matroid constraints other than convexity of faces. These constraints are described by combinatorial pseudo-triangulations, first defined and studied in this paper. Also of interest are our two proof techniques, one based on Henneberg inductive constructions from combinatorial rigidity theory, the other on a generalization of Tutte's barycentric embeddings to directed graphs.

Keywords

Pseudotriangulations
Rigidity
Graph drawing

Cited by (0)

1

Supported by grant BFM2001-1153 of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology.

2

Partly supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under grant RO 2338/2-1.

3

Supported by NSF Grant EIA-9996237.

4

Supported by NSF grants CCR-0105507 and CCR-0138374.

5

Supported by NSERC (Canada) and NIH (USA).