Problems in generic combinatorial rigidity: Sparsity, sliders, and emergence of components.

摘要

Rigidity theory deals in problems of the following form: given a structure defined by geometric constraints on a set of objects, what information about its geometric behavior is implied by the underlying combinatorial structure. The most well-studied class of structures is the bar-joint framework, which is made of fixed-length bars connected by universal joints with full rotational degrees of freedom; the allowed motions preserve the lengths and connectivity of the bars, and a framework is rigid if the only allowed motions are trivial motions of Euclidean space. A remarkable theorem of Maxwell-Laman says that rigidity of generic bar-joint frameworks depends only on the graph that has as its edges the bars and as its vertices the joints.;We generalize the "degree of freedom counts" that appear in the Maxwell-Laman theorem to the very general setting of (k, ℓ)-sparse and (k, ℓ)-graded sparse hypergraphs. We characterize these in terms of their graph-graph theoretic and matroidal properties. For the fundamental algorithmic problems Decision, Extraction, Components, and Decomposition, we give efficient, implementable pebble game algorithms for all the (k, ℓ)-sparse and (k, ℓ)-graded-sparse families of hypergraphs we study.;We then prove that all the matroids arising from (k , ℓ)-sparse are linearly representable by matrices with a certain "natural" structure that captures the incidence structure of the hypergraph and the sparsity parameters k and ℓ.;Building on the combinatorial and linear theory discussed above, we introduce a new rigidity model: slider-pinning rigidity. This is an elaboration of the planar bar-joint model to include sliders, which constrain a vertex to move on a specific line. We prove the analogue of the Maxwell-Laman Theorem for slider pinning, using, as a lemma, a new proof of Whiteley's Parallel Redrawing Theorem.;We conclude by studying the emergence of non-trivial rigid substructures in generic planar frameworks given by Erdos-Renyi random graphs. We prove that there is a sharp threshold for such substructures to emerge, and that, when they do, they are all linear size. This is consistent with experimental and simulation-based work done in the physics community on the formation of certain glasses.