Finding and Maintaining Rigid Components

Audrey Lee, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Ileana Streinu, Smith College
Louis Theran, University of Massachusetts Amherst

This document has been relocated to https://scholarworks.smith.edu/csc_facpubs/228/

Abstract

We give the first complete analysis that the complexity of finding and maintaining rigid components of planar bar-and-joint frameworks and arbitrary d-dimensional body-and-bar frameworks, using a family of algorithms called pebble games, is O(n2). To this end, we intro- duce a new data structure problem called union pair- find, which maintains disjoint edge sets and supports pair-find queries of whether two vertices are spanned by a set. We present solutions that apply to generalizations of the pebble game algorithms, beyond the original rigidity motivation.