Necessary conditions for the generic global rigidity of frameworks on surfaces (Q464737)

A framework in \(\mathbb R^d\) is a geometric realization of a combinatorial graph in \(\mathbb R^d\) where the edges are considered as bars of fixed length. Two frameworks modeled on the same graph are equivalent if the corresponding edges (bars) have the same lengths. A framework \(F\) is called globally rigid if any other framework \(F'\) modeled on the same graph is congruent to \(F\). In \(\mathbb R^2\) there are simple necessary and sufficient conditions for generic frameworks to be globally rigid. The situation is more complicated in heigher dimensions. Necessary conditions for global rigidity of generic frameworks in \(\mathbb R^d\) were obtained by B.~Hendrickson in 1992. The underlying graph \(G\) of such a globally rigid framework has to be either a complete graph on at most \(d+1\) vertices, or \(G\) is \(d+1\) connected and the framework is redundantly rigid (i.e., the framework remains rigid when any one edge is removed). The problem of global rigidity can also be formulated for frameworks whose vertices are restricted to various surfaces in \(\mathbb R^d\). The authors provide analogues to Hendrickson's necessary conditions for global rigidity of generic frameworks whose vertices lie on cylinders, cones, and ellipsoids in \(\mathbb R^d\).