Consider a planar linkage, consisting of disjoint polygonal arcs and cycles of rigid bars joined at incident endpoints (polygonal chains), with the property that no cycle surrounds another arc or cycle. We prove that the linkage can be continuously moved so that the arcs become straight, the cycles become convex, and no bars cross while preserving the bar lengths. Furthermore, our motion is piecewise-differentiable, does not decrease the distance between any pair of vertices, and preserves any symmetry present in the initial configuration. In particular, this result settles the well-studied carpenter’s rule conjecture.

Pointed pseudo-triangulations are planar minimally rigid graphs embedded in the plane with pointed vertices (incident 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—to the best of our knowledge—the first algorithmically effective result on graph embeddings with oriented matroid constraints other than convexity of faces.

We define the path of a pseudo-triangulation, a data structure generalizing the path of a triangulation of a point set. This structure allows us to use divide-andconquer type of approaches for suitable (i.e. decomposable) problems on pseudo-triangulations. We illustrate this method by presenting a novel algorithm that counts the number of pseudo-triangulations of a point set. 1

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The number of minimum pseudo-triangulations is minimized for point sets in convex position.

Abstract. For any finite set A of n points in R 2, we define a (3n − 3)dimensional simple polyhedron whose face poset is isomorphic to the poset of “non-crossing marked graphs ” with vertex set A, where a marked graph is defined as a geometric graph together with a subset of its vertices. The poset of non-crossing graphs on A appears as the complement of the star of a face in that polyhedron. The polyhedron has a unique maximal bounded face, of dimension 2ni + n − 3 where ni is the number of points of A in the interior of conv(A). The vertices of this polytope are all the pseudo-triangulations of A, and the edges are flips of two types: the traditional diagonal flips (in pseudo-triangulations) and the removal or insertion of a single edge. As a by-product of our construction we prove that all pseudo-triangulations are infinitesimally rigid graphs. 1.

One-degree-of-freedom mechanisms induced by minimum pseudo-triangulations with one convex hull edge removed have been recently introduced by the author to solve a family of non-colliding motion planning problems for planar robot arms (open or closed polygonal chains). They induce canonical roadmaps in configuration spaces of simple planar polygons with fixed edge lengths. While the combinatorial part...

Abstract. We prove that all single-vertex origami shapes are reachable from the open flat state via simple, non-crossing motions. We also consider conical paper, where the total sum of the cone angles centered at the origami vertex is not 2π. For an angle sum less than 2π, the configuration space of origami shapes compatible with the given metric has two components, and within each component, a shape can always be reconfigured via simple (non-crossing) motions. Such a reconfiguration may not always be possible for an angle sum larger than 2π. The proofs rely on natural extensions to the sphere of planar Euclidean rigidity results regarding the existence and combinatorial characterization of expansive motions. In particular, we extend the concept of a pseudo-triangulation from the Euclidean to the spherical case. As a consequence, we formulate a set of necessary conditions that must be satisfied by three-dimensional generalizations of pointed pseudo-triangulations. 1

We pose a monotonicity conjecture on the number of pseudo-triangulations of any planar point set, and check it on two prominent families of point sets, namely the so-called double circle and double chain. The latter has asymptotically 12 n n Θ(1) pointed pseudo-triangulations, which lies significantly above the maximum number of triangulations in a planar point set known so far. ⋆ Parts of this work were done while the authors visited the Departament de

A pseudo-triangle is a simple polygon with exactly three convex vertices, and a pseudo-triangulation is a face-to-face tiling of a planar region into pseudo-triangles. Pseudo-triangulations appear as data structures in computational geometry, as planar bar-and-joint frameworks in rigidity theory and as projections of locally convex surfaces. This survey of current literature includes combinatorial properties and counting of special classes, rigidity theoretical results, representations as polytopes, straight-line drawings from abstract versions called combinatorial pseudo-triangulations, algorithms and applications of pseudo-triangulations.