Abstract and generic rigidity in the plane (Q1333329)

A graph drawn in the plane with straight line edges (crossings permitted) may be thought of as a physical object consisting of rigid rods connected at their end points by flexible joints. The natural question to ask of such a framework is: is it rigid? Any triangle is rigid but rectangle will deform into a parallelogram and is not rigid; inserting a diagonal will make it rigid. Draw the complete graph \((V,E)\) in the plane and associate to each set of edges the framework consisting of those edges and their end points. Consider such an edge set \(S\). If for each \(e\) in \(S\) the framework associated with \(S-e\) admits a motion not possible in the framework for \(S\), we say \(S\) is independent. The collection of all independent edge sets defines a matroid on \(E\). The exact structure of the matroid depends upon the original embedding but all such matroids satisfy a specific list of properties. These properties are used in turn to define what are called abstract rigidity matroids. The main results of this paper is a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for an abstract rigidity matroid to be obtained from an embedding of a complete graph. The authors also give an example of an abstract rigidity matroid which does not correspond to such an embedding.